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THE 

Old Northwest 

THE BEGINNINGS OF OUR COLONIAL 
SYSTEM 



B. A. HINSDALE, Ph.D., LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND THE ART OF TEACHING IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 



REVISED EDITION 



" Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness 
of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." 

— Ordinance of 1787. 

" No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just 
commenced at the Muskingum." — Washington. 

" We look to you of the Northwest to finally decide whether this is to be a land of slavery or 
freedom. The people of the Northwest are to be the arbiters of its destiny." — Sewakd. 



SILVER, BURDETT AND COMPANY 

Boston . . . NEW YORK . . . Chicago 

1899 



vi PREFACE. 

same time such progress along the characteristic Hnes of 
American development. Moreover, this section of the coun- 
try has stood in very close relations to questions of great 
National and international importance. To portray those fea- 
tures that make it an historical unit is the central purpose 
of this book. But as the Northwest is intimately dependent 
upon the Atlantic Plain, a view of the Thirteen Colonies as 
constituted by the Royal Charters has also been given. 
No previous writer has covered the ground, and the work 
is wholly new in conception. 

Dr. Edward A. Freeman insists " that the most ingenious 
and eloquent of modern historical discourses can, after all, be 
nothing more than a comment on a text." In the following 
pages, liberal quotations from original documents will be 
found, accompanied by the necessary discussion. This 
feature of the work, it is believed, will be highly appreci- 
ated, especially by the student and the teacher. 

This work was first published in 1888, — the centenary 
of the establishment of civil government beyond the Ohio 
River. In this new edition all errors of fact that have come 
to the author's attention have been corrected ; new notes and 
references have been added ; a few passages thought super- 
fluous have been omitted ; a few points have received needed 
expansion, and the final chapter has been in great part 
rewritten. With these improvements, the work is once more 
submitted to the judgment of readers and students interested 
in Western history. 

B. A. Hinsdale. 

University of Michigan, 
September, 1898. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. North America in Outline, . . . . i 

II. The First Division of North America, . . 6 

III. The French Discover the Northwest, . . 21 

IV. The French Colonize the Northwest, . . 38 

V. England wrests the Northwest from France : 

The First Treaty of Paris, . . • 55 

VI. The Thirteen Colonies as Constituted by the 

Royal Charters (I.), . . . -70 

VII. The Thirteen Colonies as Constituted by the 

Royal Charters (II.), . . ^ . .98 

VIII. The Western Land Policy of the British Gov- 
ernment from 1763 to 1775, . . . 120 

IX. The Northwest in the Revolution, . . 147 

X. The United States wrest the Northwest from 

England : The Second Treaty of Paris, . 162 

XI. The Northwestern Land-Claims, . . . 188 

XII. The Northwestern Cessions (I.), . . -197 

XIII. The Northwestern Cessions (II.), . . . 218 



viii CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XIV. The Land-Ordinance of 1785, . . -247 

XV. The Ordinance of 1787, .... 255 

XVI. The Territory of the United States Northwest 

OF the River Ohio, .... 270 

XVII. The Admission of the Northwestern States to 

THE Union, ...... 307 

XVIII. Slavery in the Northwest, .... 335 

XIX. The Connecticut Western Reserve, . . 358 

XX. Northwestern Progress, .... 383 



LIST OF MAPS. 



I. The Old Northwest, . . , Frotitispiece. 

PAGE 

II. Drainage Features of the United States, . . 2 

III. French Explorations and Posts in the Old 

Northwest, . . . . . . 38 

IV. Territory of the Present United States, 1755 to 

1763, ....... 62 

V. Territory of the Present United States after 

February 10, 1763, . . . . .68 

VI. Proposal of the Court of France at the Second 

Treaty of Paris, . . . . .176 

VII. Boundary-lines proposed at the Second Treaty 

OF Paris, . . . . . . 180 

VIII. Territory of the Present United States after 

September 3, 1783, . . . • .186 

IX. Territory of the Thirteen Original States, . 194 

X. The Historical Divisions of Ohio, . . .281 

XI. The Old Northwest in 18S8, . « . • 383 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



I. 

NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 

North America is easily separable into three very 
plainly mafted physical divisions. The Pacific Highlands, 
which are a vast plateau surmounted by the Rocky and Sierra 
Nevada Mountain systems, extend from the Arctic Ocean to 
the Isthmus of Panama, and form the primary feature of the 
continent. The Atlantic Highlands, consisting of the Lab- 
rador Plat'eau and the Appalachian Mountain system, with 
the adjacent eastern slope, extend from Labrador almost to 
the Gulf of Mexico, and form the secondary feature. Be- 
tween the Pacific Highlands and the Atlantic Highlands, ex- 
tending from the southern Gulf to the northern Ocean, 5,000 
miles in length by 2,000 in breadth at the widest part, and 
opening out like a fan to the north, is the Central Plain. 

The Central Plain is also easily separable into three parts. 
First, the Arctic Plain descends by easy slopes from the wavy 
elevation called the Height of Land, north and northeast to 
the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay. Secondly, south of the 
Height of Land and a second similar elevation that takes off 
from it, near the head of Lake Superior, and sweeps southeast 
and northeast until it unites with the Appalachian Mountains 
in Northern New York, the Mississippi Valley falls away 
gently to the Gulf of Mexico, Thirdly, between the Arctic 
Plain and the Mississippi Valley lies the Basin of the Great 
Lakes, that is lengthened eastward in the St. Lawrence Valley. 



2 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The two sides of the continent, as divided by the eastern 
ranges of the Rocky Mountains, present the strongest con- 
trasts. The western side consists of great mountain chains, 
attaining high elevations, with short and abrupt descents to 
the Pacific Ocean ; tlie eastern side is a vast plain, descending 
to the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico, 
by long and easy lines, save in the southeast, where it is 
interrupted by the moderate elevation of the Appalachian 
Mountains. Straight lines can be drawn from the Arctic 
Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, from the southern shore of 
Lake Ontario to the' Rio Grande, and from the source of 
the Ohio to the source of the Kansas, that will at no point rise 
2,000 feet above the level of the sea. In fact, the geographer 
passes over whole States without finding any elevations of 
surface that he need represent upon a map intended for com- 
mon purposes. 

On the one side, and particularly south of 49° north lati- 
tude, the coast line is remarkably regular ; on the other side, 
remarkably irregular. 

On the west, few rivers descend to the sea, and not one of 
these cuts through the mountain masses and reaches the inte- 
rior; on the east, every subdivision of the Central Plain is 
traversed by a great natural water-way. Hudson Strait, Hud- 
son Bay, and the Nelson-Winnipeg River system together 
reach the very foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. The 
noble St. Lawrence, cutting through the Appalachian Moun- 
tains, opens a channel for the Great Lakes to discharge their 
floods, and for man to ascend to the central parts of the con- 
tinent. The Mississippi — ^Father of Waters — with his 35,000 
miles of navigable affluents, gives ready means of access to 
every part of the great valley that bears his name. If three 
men should ascend these three water-ways to their farthest 
sources, they would find themselves in the heart of North 
America, and, so to speak, within a stone's-throw of one 
another. One of these water-ways has played hitherto no 
considerable part in the affairs of civilized men ; but the 



NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 3 

other two are as prominent in the history of America as they 
are in its geography. 

The world scarcely offers a parallel to the ease and celerity 
with which the passage can be made from the upper waters 
of any one of these great water-ways to either of the others. 
" The Great Lakes occupy an elevated plateau, the summit, 
in fact, of the vast expanse of land which spreads out between 
the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains ; no large streams 
flow into them, and they drain limited areas;"' and their 
basins are separated from the regions north and south by 
water-sheds that in no point rise to the dignity of mountains. 
Lake Superior is 900 feet above the Gulf of St. Lawrence ; 
Lake Itasca, Pittsburg, and Cairo are 1650, 700, and 300 feet 
respectively above the Gulf of Mexico. From Omaha west 
along the Platte River, the Union Pacific Railroad ascends by 
a grade of five feet to the mile; while from St. Paul north- 
west to the Yellowstone, the ascent is but two feet to the 
mile. In Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin the streams 
flowing in opposite directions often head in the same swamps ; 
and in times of high water it would almost be possible to 
push a flat-bottomed boat from the Lake Basin into the Mis- 
sissippi Valley. The highest level of the Ohio Canal is 395 
feet, the highest level of the Miami Canal, 380 feet, above 
Lake Erie. A simple pump sufifices to carry the sewage of 
Chicago to a level where gravitation takes it to the Missis- 
sippi. Lake Michigan once had a natural outlet to the Gulf 
of Mexico, and when the Drainage Canal now approaching 
completion is finished, it will be an artificial one. 

In the days when the Northwest was discovered and ex- 
plored, and again in the days when it was settled, the short 
and easy portages between the northern and southern streams, 
scattered all the way from Western New York to Minnesota, 
were of very great importance. 

The Appalachian system consists of several chains or 

' Hubbard : Memorials of a Half Century, 3. 



4 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ranges, and the valleys lying between them. To the ex- 
plorer or pioneer attempting to reach the interior, they op- 
posed a continuous mountain-wall from 3,500 to 7,000 feet in 
height, a slight obstacle, indeed, as compared with the moun- 
tains on the other side of the continent, but still considerable, 
and playing no unimportant part in history. The Atlantic 
Plain, as the slope east of these mountains is called, is coursed 
by many rivers that furnish excellent harbors at their mouths 
and render the whole region readily accessible from the sea. 
Five of these rivers, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Sus- 
quehanna, the Potomac, and the James, cut deeply into the 
mountains. The valleys of these rivers to-day are road- 
ways for great lines of travel and transportation leading to 
the West ; but when the country was in a state of nature, 
only one of them offered an easy passage from the Atlantic 
Plain to the Mississippi Valley. Geologists tell us that once 
Lake Ontario had an outlet to New York Bay ; and certain 
it is that by the Hudson and Mohawk, the streams flowing 
to the Lakes whose sources are intertwined with those of the 
Mohawk, and the short and easy portages between them, the 
explorer and the colonist could readily have reached the in- 
terior but for a formidable obstacle that will receive attention 
in another place. Despite this obstacle, the site of Oswego 
was visited by Englishmen before the site of Pittsburg; Avhile 
it was through the Mohawk Valley that the first canal and 
railroad were built connecting the East and the West. From 
New York Bay to the St. Lawrence extends a deep valley 
that cuts the mountains asunder; Hudson River fills the 
southern half, Lake Champlain and the River Richelieu the 
northern half, of this valley ; and these waters, together with 
the easy " divide " between them, have played a very impor- 
tant part in American history from the very first. 

These geographical features of our continent have been 
boldly sketched, because they have had the greatest influence 
upon the course of American, and particularly of Western- 
American, history. Had some convulsion of nature lowered 



NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 5 

the Appalachian Mountains to the level of the country east 
and west at the time the first English colonies were founded 
on the Atlantic slope, or thrown up a system of mountains as 
high as the Appalachians along the low water-sheds that sep- 
arate the Lake Basin and the Arctic Plain from the Missis- 
sippi Valley when the first French settlements in Canada 
were planted, no one can tell in what different lines history 
would have run. Nor can one rightly estimate the prodigious 
influence upon the Northwest of the fact that it lies partly 
within the Lake Basin and partly within the Mississippi Val- 
ley, and that it holds in its bosom all the rivers flowing to 
the Lakes on the south, and to the Mississippi on the west, 
from the Ohio to the head of Lake Superior. 

Speaking relatively, North America has an open and a 
closed side ; and fortunately it is the open side that faces 
Europe. 

Note. — The author has treated the subject of the early chapters 
of this work more fully in his book entitled How to Study and Teach 
History, N. Y., 1S94, chaps, xv., xvi., xvii. 



TI. 
THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. 

For two hundred years after its discovery, North America 
had no independent life and history. The seeds of future 
American questions were being thickly planted, but for the 
time no such questions appeared. The continent was the 
theatre of European ambition, strife, and endeavor. Three 
great nations played each an important part in the drama — 
Spain, France, and England. We are now to see how the 
country was first divided among them. 

I. The Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The Spaniards had not firmly established themselves in the 
West Indies before they plunged into the Caribbean Sea and 
the Gulf of Mexico. Columbus himself was on the coast of 
South America in 1498, and on the coast of Central America 
in 1502 and 1503. Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien, and 
discovered and named the South Sea, in 1 5 1 3. Cortez began 
the conquest of Mexico in 15 19, and Pizarro that of Peru in 
1526. In 1 5 13 Ponce de Leon discovered and named Florida. 
Miruelo ran along the western side of the peninsula as far as 
Pensacola in 15 16. In 15 19 Pineda coasted the northern 
shore of the Gulf as far as Panuco, in Mexico, and on his re- 
turn discovered the Mississippi River, which was first called 
*' The River of the Holy Spirit." In 1520 Ayllon sailed to 
the coast of Georgia and South Carolina ; and five years later 
he continued his explorations as far as Virginia, where he 
planted an ill-fated settlement on the future site of James- 
town. In 1527 De Narvaez conducted an unfortunate expe- 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. 7 

dition to the northern shore of the Gulf. He lost his life 
while crossing the stream of the Mississippi out at sea, but De 
Vaca, one of his lieutenants, and a few others, survived the 
perils of the deep and of the land, to tell in after-years one of 
the most romantic tales to be found in the history of Ameri- 
can exploration. Hernando de Soto, Governor of Cuba, hav- 
ing obtained from Charles V. a grant of the country from 
Florida to the River of Palms, landed at Tampa Bay in 1539 
with a large and well-appointed command. He hoped to find 
a rich Indian kingdom, such as Pizarro had found in Peru and 
Cortez in Mexico. After two years' marching in the interior, 
De Soto, disappointed in his search, found himself in latitude 
35° north, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Crossing 
the river, he continued his march many hundreds of miles to 
the northwest ; but, still disappointed, he returned the next 
year to the river, his command greatly reduced by battle, dis- 
ease, and famine, and himself wasted in body and broken in 
spirit, where he died. In the sonorous language of Bancroft : 
" His soldiers pronounced his eulogy by grieving for their 
loss ; the priests chanted over his body the first requiems that 
were ever heard on the waters of the Mississippi. To conceal 
his death, his body was wrapped in a mantle, and in the still- 
ness of midnight was silently sunk in the middle of the 
stream. The wanderer had crossed a large part of the conti- 
nent in his search for gold, and found nothing so remarkable 
as his burial-place." ' His surviving companions fled down the 
river to the Gulf, and made their way to their countrymen 
in Mexico. At the same time that De Soto was seeking his 
imaginary El Dorado in the region south of the Missouri, 
Coronado, who had come overland from Mexico, was 
searching in the same region for the fabled " Seven cities of 
Cibola." The two commands were so near each other " that 
an Indian runner, in a few days, might have carried tidings 
between them;" in fact, "Coronado actually heard of his 

' History : 6-vulume edition, 1S76, I., 50. 



8 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

countryman, and sent him a letter, but his messenger failed 
to find De Soto's party." ' Spaniards had now virtually met 
in the centre of the Mississippi Valley, coming from points as 
distant as Tampa Bay and the Gulf of California ; they had 
found no El Dorado or Cibola, and they gave over the at- 
tempt at exploration and conquest in these regions. 

In no important sense did the Spanish discoveries make 
known the Mississippi to the world. Holding the shore line 
from Florida to Mexico, Spain, in the sixteenth century, had 
the finest opportunity ever offered any nation to explore, 
occupy, and possess the Mississippi Valley; the Appalachi- 
cola, the Mobile, the Colorado, and, above all, the Mississippi 
itself, invited her to ascend them and people their banks. 
No powerful Indian nation was on the soil to oppose her, 
no European rival was present to deny her right. Why did 
she not do so ? The answer is one of the exploded theories of 
political economy. In that age Europeans generally, and 
Spaniards particularly, held to the "Bullion Theory:" The 
precious metals are the only form of wealth. Not finding 
them in the region visited by De Soto, Spain fixed her atten- 
tion on regions where she had already found them ; and so 
intent was she on the mines of Mexico and South America, 
that hergallions ploughed the waters of the Gulf for one hun- 
dred years, ignorant or regardless of the fact that they were 
crossing and recrossing before a portal that stood always open 
to admit them to the richest valley in the world. So indif- 
ferent was Spain to her opportunity that in the next century 
she allowed the Mississippi to slip from her hands to those 
of France, without serious protest. When another century 
had gone, she awoke from her indifference, and made strenu- 
ous efforts to recall the mistake. Unfortunately for her, but 
fortunately for the world, it was too late. Fortunately for 
the world : for what greater calamity could have befallen civ- 
ilization on this continent than a South America or a Mexico 

' Narrative and Critical History of America, II., 292. 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. 9 

planted between the Alleghany and the Rocky Mountains ? 
Still, Spain, in the sixteenth century, founded two settlements 
within the present limits of the United States. Santa Fe, 
hidden away, in 1582, in one of the upper valleys of the Rio 
Grande, never played any part in history until our own times. 
But to hold Florida against all comers was to Spain a simple 
necessity. The peninsula offered an excellent base for attack- 
ing the fleets that bore the spoil of the East Indies, Mexico, 
and Peru from Vera Cruz and Carthagena to Spain, as well 
as for menacing the islands at the entrance of the Gulf ; and 
" the hurricanes of the tropics had already strewn the Florida 
coast with the fragments of Spanish wrecks." ' Hence the 
savage vigor with Avhich she expelled the Huguenot colonies 
from Northern Florida, and the persistence with which she 
held the English colonists on the north at bay down to 1763, 
when she surrendered the peninsula as the price of the Queen 
of the Antilles. St. Augustine, founded in 1565, a castle 
rather than a colony, was the key to the positions of Spain 
in the Gulf and in the East India seas. 

II. The French in the Valley of the St. Lawrence. 

Verrazzano in 1524 led the first French ofificial exploring 
expedition to North America. He sailed along the coast from 
latitude 32° to Newfoundland, landing at many places, and 
visiting New York Bay, and then returned to France. This 
voyage, which added considerably to contemporary knowledge 
of America, and led to other and more important voyages, 
crave color to the claim that France afterward made to the 
whole coast within the extreme points that Verrazzano 
touched. James Carticr, also with a French commission, 
made three voyages to the northern parts of the continent in 
1534, 1535, and 1540. In 1534 he explored the coast of New- 
foundland and the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, visited 
Labrador, and discovered the St. Lawrence River. Hoping 

' Narrative and Critical History of America, 11. , 254. 



lO THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

that this river was the long-sought passage to Cathay, Cartier 
sailed up its current to Stadeconna, the Indian name of Que- 
bec. Leaving here his ships, he pushed on with two or three 
boats and a few companions to Hochelaga, an Indian town 
on the present site of Montreal. It was the month of Sep- 
tember ; the northern forests were putting on their gorgeous 
autumn garments, and the Frenchmen could not sufficiently 
admire the beauty of the country. Cartier visited Stadeconna 
and Hochelaga again in 1540, when he took possession of 
Canada, as the Indians called the country, in the name of his 
royal master, by raising a cross surmounted by the flciir-de- 
lis, and emblazoned with the legend : Franciscus primus, 
DEI GRATIA Francorum Rex regnat. Attempts to col- 
onize the valley were immediately made, but they ended in 
failure. 

Samuel deChamplain was the father of Canada. He came 
to America with Pontgrave, in 1603. Sent up the St. Law- 
rence to Hochelaga, he was filled, like Cartier, with admira- 
tion as he viewed the country, and was at once convinced that 
this valley, and not Acadia, must be the seat of the future 
French-American Empire. Deeply patriotic and fervently 
religious, Champlain longed to plant among the forests and 
waters of the north a colony that should shed lustre on the 
arms of France and extend the bounds of the Catholic Church. 
The forests and waters abounded in the valuable furs that, 
next to gold and silver, were the prime object of search to the 
first American colonists ; they would shield a colony from its 
enemies ; while the great river that was lost in unknown re- 
gions of mystery would probably lead on to the lands of 
Marco Polo. He returned to France burning with desire to 
carry out this purpose. His coveted opportunity soon came; 
in 1608 he had the great happiness to plant, under the rock 
of Quebec, the first permanent French settlement in Canada. 
The next year he plunged into the wilds of Northern New 
York, where, near the head of Lake Champlain, he met a war 
party of Mohawk Indians. Although he destroyed the party, 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. II 

Champlain was so much impressed by their courage, and by 
wliat he heard of the formidable confederacy to which they 
belonged, that on returning to Canada he directed his atten- 
tion to the north and west, where he found man, if not nature, 
more tractable. 

The Gulf and River St. Lawrence, and the streams that 
fall into the river on the north, gave the French easy entrance 
to the interior of the great continent. Ascending to the 
head of Lake Huron by the Ottawa, Lake Nipissing, and 
Georgian Bay, they were at the foot of Lakes Michigan and 
Superior, that stand to the Northwest in some such relation 
as the lung-lobes to the human body. Ascending the St. 
Lawrence to the southern shore of Lake Ontario, they had 
turned the left flank of the Appalachian Mountains, and 
gained the edge of that vast plain which stretches away to 
the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande. The use that they 
made of these advantages will form the subject of a future 
chapter. 

It was most fortunate that Champlain concluded not to 
invade the seats of the Iroquois, but to lay the foundations of 
New France farther to the north. Had he persisted in his 
first purpose, and been successful, he would have made the re- 
gion in which the Genesee and the Richelieu, the Hudson 
and the Delaware, the Susquehanna and the Ohio take their 
rise French territory, and so have given the French the advant- 
age of a position that two great generals have called the key to 
the eastern half of the United States.' As it was, Champlain 
fully won the title accorded him : " Father of New France." 
The planting of Quebec was the most important event that 
had taken place in North America since its discovery, save 
only the planting of Jamestown the previous year. 

' "General Scott, standing on the field of Bemus Heights, declared this Com- 
monwealth [New York] to hold the military key of the continent east of the Mis- 
sissippi, and on the same spot, General Grant confirmed the judgment." Roberts : 
New York, in Commonwealth Series, I., 124- 



12 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

III. The English on the Atlantic Plain. 

John Cabot, sailing with a commission from Henry VII. 
of England, discovered North America, June 24, 1497, making 
his landfall, it is probable, on the Island of Cape Breton. 
The next year, acting under the same authority, he con- 
ducted a second exploring expedition farther to the south- 
ward. How much of the coast of the continent he skirted 
in the two voyages is not certainly known, but it is not 
unlikely that he touched points as far apart as Northern 
Labrador and South Carolina or Georgia. He took posses- 
sion of the country in the name of his royal patron, and 
English historians, statesmen, and jurists have always based 
on these voyages England's claim to that portion of North 
America which fell to her at the first apportionment. 

For a long time, owing to her unwillingness to offend 
Spain, to her absorption in attempts to find the northeast and 
northwest passages, to her domestic troubles, and to her indif- 
ference, England took little interest in the new empire that 
John Cabot had given her; but toward the close of the six- 
teenth century she began to awake to her opportunity, and 
to take an interest in western planting. Her first colony was 
Jamestown, planted in 1607 ; and between that date and 
1733 she had absorbed the Dutch and the Swedes on the 
Hudson and the Delaware, and divided the whole coast, often 
by boundary lines that ran to the Pacific Ocean, into thirteen 
colonies. 

Both in respect to character and geographical position, the 
colonists of the Atlantic Plain present strong points of con- 
trast to those on the Gulf coast and those in the St. Lawrence 
Valley. They were not adventurers thirsting for gold and 
conquest, like the Spaniards ; nor were they trappers, traders 
in furs, voyagenrs, and priests intent on Indian evangelization, 
like the French. There was, indeed, in most of the thirteen 
colonies a considerable infusion of adventure, but it took the 
direction of business rather than of conquest. Nearly all the 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. 13 

English colonists were interested in industry, trade, and poli- 
tics ; and many of them, as the New Englanders and Mary- 
landers, came seeking in the wilderness those religious and 
civil rights that were denied them at home. They were not 
blind to the advantage of the fur trade, nor wholly indifferent 
to the religious state of the Indians ; but Indian trade was the 
smaller part of their commerce, and their religious zeal took 
the direction of establishing new churches where they could 
themselves live at peace rather than of converting the savages 
to the old one. Accordingly, they were more than content 
to plant their settlements by the sea. 

Then the English seem to have been more thoroughly than 
either the French or the Spaniards under the influence of those 
false ideas of the North American continent that did so much 
to shape the course of history. 

To the imagination of Europe, America was first an archi- 
pelago. The explanation of this belief is due to several cir- 
cumstances : to Columbus's expectation that he would first 
come to the outlying Asiatic islands; to his belief that the 
West Indies were the islands that he expected to find ; and 
to the fact that the early voyagers to North America touched 
the coast at widely separated parts, which geographers were 
unable for a long time properly to connect. In 1660 Endicott 
called New England "this Patmos," and as late as 1740 the 
Duke of Newcastle directed letters to the " Island of New 
England." 

Navigators and geographers next conceived of our conti- 
nent as a long and narrow strip of land running north and 
south, cut by water-ways that connected the two oceans. 
Most evident signs that a great continent lay behind the shore 
that seamen touched at points as remote as Labrador and 
Mexico, such as the great rivers that came down to the sea, 
were constantly disregarded. "A Mapp of Virginia" sold in 
London in 165 1 lays down Hudson River as communicating 
by "a mighty great lake "with "the sea of China and the 
Indies," and carries a lecrend runninsf alone the shore of Cali- 



14 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

fornia, " whose happy shores (in ten days' march with fifty 
foot and thirty horsemen from the head of James River, over 
those hills and through the rich adjacent valleys beautifyed 
with as proffitable rivers which necessarily must run into that 
peaceful! Indian sea) may be discovered to the exceeding 
benefit of Great Britain and joye of all true English." ' An of- 
ficial map of Maryland, published in 1670, and certified by a 
competent authority to be by " no means a bad one," represents 
the Alleghanies above the Cumberland Mountains, and gives 
this description of them : " These mighty high and great Moun- 
taines, trending N.E. and S.W. and W.S.W,, is supposed to 
be the very middle ridg of Northern America and the only 
Natural cause of the fierceness and extreame stormy cold 
winds that come northwest from thence all over this continent 
and makes frost," "^ This conception of North America ex- 
plains the endeavors of Smith, Hudson, and Cartier to find 
the India road in the rivers that they explored. It explains 
also the fact that Captain Newport, in 1608, brought over 
from England a barge so constructed that it could be taken to 
pieces and then put together, with which he and his company 
were instructed to ascend the James River as far as the falls, 
then to carry their barge beyond the falls and descend to the 
south sea, " being ordered not to return without a lump of gold 
as a certainty of the said sea." This persistent misconception 
of North America was due to that mental prepossession which 
prevented men seeing any insuperable obstacle to their find- 
ing a western sea-road to the Indies, and to the fact that Bal- 
boa, Drake, and others, from the mountains of Darien, had seen 
the two oceans that wash its shores. It is well to illustrate 
this false notion thus at length, because evidences of its influ- 
ence in history are abundant. 

Shut out from the Gulf of Mexico by the Spaniards, and 
from the River St, Lawrence by the French ; not caring to 



' Narrative and Critical History, III., 465, 

^ Browne : Maryland, in the Commonwealth Series, 100. 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. 1 5 

venture far from the coast inland, and actually confined to it 
by a great physical cause, the English were much slower than 
their rivals in seeing in North America a vast continent. 

Then, when the English colonists ascended from one to two 
hundred miles the rivers coursing the Atlantic Plain they 
found themselves confronted by the Appalachian wall and 
their further progress arrested. Accustomed to pass and re- 
pass, these mountains in a few hours' time at a dozen points, 
it is difficult for us to conceive how, at that day, they im- 
pressed the imaginations of men and retarded the spread of 
settlements to the West. The southern Indians called them 
the " Endless Mountains," the English, sometimes, " the Great 
Mountains." 

The memorials of the first emigrants to Ohio, although 
the best natural roads had now been discovered and im- 
proved, and all obstruction from the Indians had ceased, tell 
us how difficult of passage they found these mountain ridges. 
In fact, at the close of the last century, the safest, easiest, and 
quickest line of travel from Philadelphia or Baltimore to Cen- 
tral Kentucky, or even to Fort Washington, that stood on the 
present site of Cincinnati, led to Wadkin's Ferry on the Po- 
tomac ; thence up the Shenandoah Valley, through Martins- 
burg, Winchester, and Staunton; thence over the "divide" 
to New River and on to Cumberland Gap — the " Wilder- 
ness Road" of early Western emigration, the "Valley Road'' 
of recent warfare — and thence by Crab Orchard and Lex- 
ington to the Ohio.' 

At the north. Nature had indeed prepared a highway to 
the West ; but the Mohawk Valley was exposed to attack 
from Canada, as the burning of Schenectady shows, while the 
people of the Long House blocked the Englishman's way to 
the Lake Basin almost as effectually as they blocked the 
Frenchman's way to the sources of the Delaware and the 
Susquehanna. The Iroquois were generally friendly to the 

' Speed : The Wilderness Road, I2, 23. 



l6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

English and hostile to the French ; but that haughty, jealous 
race were but little more disposed to see their ancestral seats 
invaded by their friends than by their foes. 

The facts now presented account for the extreme tardiness 
of the English colonists in entering the country west of the 
Appalachian Mountains. It is related that one Colonel Abra- 
ham Wood, who dwelt at the falls of the Appomattox, with 
a party of hunters and traders, crossed the Blue Ridge' and 
discovered New River in 1654. It is said that a Captain 
Henry Batte, in 1666, coming also from Appomattox, crossed 
the mountains, and followed for some distance a stream flow- 
ing westward. It is further related that a Captain Bolton 
reached the Mississippi in 1670; that a party of New Eng- 
landers, in 1677, made their way overland to New Mexico, 
and on their return told their story to the Boston authorities ; 
and that Virginians were at the falls of the Kanawha in 1671. 
To find authority for these reports, or any of them, seems a 
hopeless undertaking. Parkman says neither the Wood nor 
the Bolton tale is "sustained by sufficient authority," and 
he pronounces the Boston story " without proof and im- 
probable." ' 

The tenacity with which the English colonists clung to 
the coast, their meagre ideas of the continent behind them, 
and the lack of romantic elements in their life, are well illus- 
trated in Governor Spotswood's famous adventure to the Shen- 
andoah Valley in August and September, 17 16. We have 
the authority of the governor for saying that a company of 
Virginians ascended the Blue Ridge Mountains, " Tho' they 
had hitherto been thought to be unpassable," in 161 o; but he 
himself was the first to lead the way into the valley beyond. 
Attended by some members of his staff, Spotswood pro- 
ceeded in his coach from Williamsburg to the frontier. Here 
he was joined by some Virginia gentlemen and their retainers, 
a company of rangers, and four Indians, fifty persons in all. 

' La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. Introduction. 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. I? 

Taking to horse, the gay company took their westward 
way by the upper Rappahannock. On the thirty-sixth day 
from Williamsburg they scaled the mountains, and saw the 
valley beyond that has commanded so much admiration. 
After drinking the king's health, they descended the western 
slope to the river, which they crossed and named the 
" Euphrates." The governor took formal possession of the 
region for George I. of England. Much light is thrown upon 
the convivial habits of Virginians at that time by an entry 
found in the diary of the chronicler. " We got all the men 
together and loaded their arms, and we drank the king's 
health in champagne and fired a volley, the princess' health 
in Burgundy and fired a volley, and all the rest of the 
royal family in claret and a volley; we drank the governor's 
health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of 
liquors : viz., Virginia red wine and white wine, Irish usque- 
baugh, brandy, shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary, 
cherry punch, cider, etc." The lapse of eight weeks and the 
distance of 440 miles travelled, going and coming, brought 
Spotswood back to Williamsburg. He now celebrated the 
hardships of the journey by creating the " Knights of the 
Golden Horseshoe." To ascend the mountains the horses 
had been shod with iron, which was unnecessary in tide-water 
Virginia ; and the governor caused small golden horseshoes, 
set with jewels and inscribed with the legend, Sic jnvat trans- 
ccndcrc monies, to be made in London and distributed among 
his companions. This expedition was important in results, 
but its most noticeable feature is its date, 17 16. This was 
one hundred and nine years after the landing at Jamestown, 
and thirty-four years after La Salle had navigated the Missis- 
sippi from the Illinois to the Gulf. Spotswood's main ob- 
ject was to study the relation of the Virginia frontier to the 
French in the Lake country. How little advantage he de- 
rived from his observations and inquiries of the Indians is 
well told in this paragraph from one of his letters, written 
in 1718 : 



l8 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" The chief aim of my expedition over the great mountains, 
in 17 16, was to satisfy myself whether it was practicable to 
come at the Lakes. Having on that occasion found an easy 
passage over that great ridge of mountains w'ch before were 
judged impassable, I also discovered, by the relation of Indians 
who frequent those parts, that from the pass where I was it is 
but three days' march to a great nation of Indians living on a 
river w'ch discharges itself in the Lake Erie ; that from ye 
western side of one of the small mountains w'ch I saw that lake 
is very visible, and cannot, therefore, be above five days' march 
from the pass aforementioned, and that the way thither is also 
very practicable, the mountains to the westward of the great 
ridge being smaller than those I passed on the eastern side, 
w'ch shews how easy a matter it is to gain possession of those 
lakes." ' 

Who the first Englishmen were to pass the Great Moun- 
tains and descend the streams flowing to the setting sun, can 
never be known. They undoubtedly belonged to that class 
of Indian hunters who, following every stream to its head- 
spring, and entering every gap in the mountain ranges, dis- 
covered the path leading from the Potomac by Wills' Creek 
to the Ohio in 1748, and who, a little later, "gave names to 
the streams and ridges of Tennessee, annually passed the 
Cumberland Gap, and chased game in the basin of the Cum- 
berland River." * They are men who have no individuality, 
as have the French discoverers in the north and west. The 
influence of the Colonial character in confining the English 
to the sea-shore has been pointed out ; the reflex of that con- 
finement upon the Colonial character and life will receive at- 
tention in another place ; but here the observation may be 
dropped that the colonists were a long time developing the 



' Cooke, Virginia, in the Commonwealth Series, 314, 315, and Waddell, An- 
nals of Augusta County, 6-9, give accounts of the Spotswood expedition. The 
passages quoted are from Waddell. 

''Bancroft : History, II., 362; III., 63. 



THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. 19 

typical Indian hunter and fighter. Such men as Boone and 
Kenton and Wetzel belong to the country west of the moun- 
tains. 

By a sort of tacit agreement, the three powers adopted 
priority of discovery as the rule for dividing and appropriat- 
ing North America. Spain was at first disposed to claim the 
whole continent under the papal bull of 1493 ; but the mari- 
time enterprise, military and naval power, and diplomatic 
force of England and France compelled her to admit them to 
a share of the spoil. The Spanish navigators and explorers 
from Columbus to De Soto gave the Gulf region to Spain ; 
Cartier gave the St. Lawrence to France, and Cabot the At- 
lantic Plain to England. 

The adjustment of territorial claims and rights was a long 
and difficult process ; and it was only as the principle of use 
and settlement, and even the sword, was brought in to help 
out discovery that points of dispute were ever settled. The 
recognition by Spain of discovery as the ground of title left 
unanswered the question where the boundary line should be 
drawn between Florida and the Carolinas and Georgia, and 
the question was never put at rest until she yielded the whole 
peninsula in 1763. France at first claimed the Atlantic coast 
south of Nova Scotia under the voyage of Verrazano ; but 
the failure of the Huguenot colonies in Carolina and Plorida, 
and the resolution of England in insisting upon the Cabot 
title, led France to yield that shore, and to content her ambi- 
tion with the north. John Cabot discovered the northeastern 
coast years before the first French navigator crossed the ocean ; 
but as England did not follow up discovery with settlement, 
and as the French made greater discoveries in that quarter, a 
vast region that might have been England's fell to France. 
Henry IV. of France, in the patent that he gave to De Monts, 
carried the southern boundary of Acadia to the latitude of 
Philadelphia ; and the English kings lapped their charters over 
upon the French, as we shall soon see. Again, under the rule 



20 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

of priority Spain was entitled to the Mississippi Valley ; but, 
like England on the northeast coast, she did not follow dis- 
covery with occupation, and so the valley fell to France, who 
entered it from the north. This brought France and England 
into collision along the western side of the Alleghanies, as 
well as in the northeast and north. In general, the disputes 
as to the rightful ownership of a given region of territory grew 
out of one or both of two circumstances : a disagreement as to 
who the first discoverer was, or a disagreement as to how far 
the rights resulting from his discovery extended. Every one 
of the powers admitted that the others had territorial rights, 
but their quarrels never ended until France retired from the 
continent. 

The remark should be added that it is impossible to repre- 
sent correctly these facts on maps. The names " Acadia," 
"Virginia," and " Florida "stand for very different things at 
different times ; and at no particular time, for a full century 
following Jamestown, were their boundary lines defined. The 
lines of delimitation, drawn on the most carefully constructed 
maps, answer but a vague general purpose. The French in- 
cluded Plymouth and New Amsterdam in Acadia, and Spanish 
maps of the seventeenth century sometimes carry Florida be- 
yond Quebec. But more absurd than this, some sixteenth- 
century geographers, and notably the Dutch, " out of spite to 
the Spaniards," include the whole of both North and South 
America in New France. ' 

' Parkman : Pioneers of France in the New World, 183, 184, note. 



III. 
THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 

What ready access to the heart of North America the 
Saint Lawrence gave the French, was pointed out in the first 
and second chapters. We are now to see what use they made 
of their opportunity. 

The advantages of the position harmonized admirably with 
the French character, particularly as developed under the 
new conditions, and with the great ideas that underlay New 
France. These northern colonists shrunk from a life of ma- 
terial development like that of their southern neighbors ; 
they had some agriculture, but they were not such tillers of 
the soil as the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the Dutch of 
Hudson River, the Quakers of the Delaware, and still less 
the Virginia or Carolina planters ; they cared for no trade but 
that in furs and peltries; they were indifferent to civil and 
religious freedom, and had no share in that passion for politi- 
cal and religious progress that characterized the British colo- 
nists ; and, so far from desiring a State without a king and a 
Church without a bishop, they could not even conceive of State 
and Church without them. They never developed a self-reli- 
ant colonial character, but were more than content to go on as 
they began — the children of patronage and power. But they 
desired to enlarge the borders of France and increase her 
glory ; they loved the fur trade ; and they longed to plant the 
emblems of the true faith beside all the unknown rivers and 
hidden lakes of the wilderness. Not only did the bolder 
minds burn to penetrate the secrets of the continent, but the 
majority, now hunters or farmers, and now soldiers or voy- 



22 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ageurs, loved die free and picturesque life of the forests and 
waters that made the history of Canada one long adventure. 
Dominion, evangelization of the Indians, and the fur trade 
were the three ideas on which the colony rested. The sol- 
dier, the priest, and the trader are the three types of charac- 
ter that are never out of our sight. In one marked feature the 
French plan of colonization differed from that of the English. 
The English found no place whatever, not even the smallest, 
for the Indians : the French made them the very centre and 
heart of their whole scheme. Sympathetic, social, pliable to 
new conditions, the French revealed a genius for getting on 
with the savages that is rather confirmed than disproved by 
their sore experience with the Iroquois. With such ideas as 
these, under leaders who combined adventure, religious zeal, 
and far-reaching policy, they gained the rear and northern 
flank of the English settlements, and, almost before the lat- 
ter, absorbed with their farms and shops, fishing and trade, 
churches and politics, were aware of what was going on, well- 
nigh confined them to the narrow slope between the moun- 
tains and the sea. There is no reason to think that Cham- 
plain saw the final end ; but he marked out the general plan, 
and was himself the first to put it in practice. 

In 1611 Champlain made the rude beginnings of the city 
of Montreal. Here he and the French traders met the wild 
warriors and hunters as they descended the St. Lawrence and 
the Ottawa : he to win influence over the Indians and to gain 
knowledge of their country, they to buy the Indian catch of 
beaver-skins. In 161 3, following two pioneers whom he had 
sent to winter with the Indians, he ascended the Ottawa, and 
thus began the first survey of the route by which the Cana- 
dian Pacific Railway passes from the valley of the St. Lawrence 
to the region of the Upper Lakes. Trusting the false tale of 
one of the two pioneers, he expected to reach a great northern 
sea that would bear him on to the regions of the East, which 
Columbus had sought in the western waters. Disappointed 
in this endeavor, he still reached the Isle des Allumettes, the 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 23 

Indian half-way house to Lake Huron, before returning to 
Quebec. In this v'^ast primeval forest, six years after Smith 
landed on the shore of the James, but sev^en years before the 
foot of Miles Standish touched Plymouth Rock, Champlain 
won the respect of the Indian tribes and displayed the em- 
blems of his religion. 

In the month of May, 161 5, four Recollet friars, a branch 
of the great Franciscan order, landed at Quebec. They came 
by the procurement of Champlain to carry forward the work 
of Indian conversions. Having celebrated the first mass ever 
heard in Canada, they distributed to each a province of the 
wilderness empire of Satan. To Le Caron the Hurons were 
assigned ; and soon the priest was on his way to their distant 
villages. As well the heroic temper of the man as his relig- 
ious outlook is shown by a single sentence from one of his let- 
ters to a friend : "I must needs tell you what abundant con- 
solation 1 found under all my troubles ; for when one sees so 
many infidels needing nothing but a drop of water to make 
them children of God, he feels an inexpressible ardor to 
labor for their conversion, and sacrifice to it his repose and his 
life." ' Soon the soldier followed the priest. Ascending the 
Ottawa and the Mattawan, crossing the portage to Lake 
Nipissing, and then descending French River and Georgian 
Bay, Champlain found his way to the " Mer Douce " of the 
French maps, the Lake Huron of ours. Striking inland from 
Thunder Bay, he found Le Caron already established in the 
country of the Hurons. 

The savages w^ere all expectation ; for the white chief whose 
prowess on the battle-field they had already learned, had prom- 
ised to lead them against the Iroquois. The attack upon the 
Senecas in Central New York proved a failure, and Cham- 
plain returned with the Hurons to their villages, where he 
spent the winter. In the spring he returned to his colony, 
where he had been given up for dead ; and the first French 

' Parkman : Pioneers of France, 363, 364. 



24 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

exploration undertaken with a settled plan was at an end. 
Three or four important things had been accomplished. The 
two early routes to Lake Huron had been discovered — one by 
the Ottawa and Nipissing, the other by the, Trent and Lake 
Simcoe ; " Mer Douce " and Lake Ontario, the first two of 
the five lakes seen by white men, had been found; French in- 
fluence over the mind of the savages had been felt in a wider 
sphere; and, finally, the scene of the future Huron Mission 
had been visited. It was Champlain's last and greatest 
achievement as an explorer ; it was the first step toward the 
French possession of the Old Northwest, and also the first in 
that long march which more than a hundred years later 
brought Frenchmen and Englishmen together in deadly strife 
beyond the Great Mountains. 

Were we sketching the broader subject, we should now 
turn aside to watch the experiment of Indian evangelization 
tried by the Jesuits, who had succeeded the Recollets, among 
the Hurons. Mr. Parkman has told that story with his accus- 
tomed learning and eloquence. Here two facts will suffice. 
Just as the Jesuits were thanking God for what seemed an as- 
sured success — the conversion of a savage nation to the Cross 
— the Iroquois fell upon them, and scattered the Hurons in a 
storm of blood and fire. Secondly, the destruction of this 
mission, rather the truculent fury of the " Romans of the 
West " that caused it, was an important element in great ques- 
tions. Mr. Parkman tells us that, could the French have 
brought the haughty Iroquois within the circle of their full in- 
fluence, American history would still have reached its des- 
tined goal, but by somewhat different paths. Tamed savages 
ruled by priests would have been scattered through the val- 
leys of the Lakes and the Mississippi ; slaughter would have 
been repressed and agriculture developed ; the Indian popula- 
tion would not have declined, if it did not increase ; and the 
fur trade would have enriched Canada. France would have' 
filled " the West with traders, settlers, and garrisons, and cut 
up the virgin wilderness into fiefs, while as yet the colonies of 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 2$ 

England were but a weak and broken line along the shore of 
the Atlantic ; and when at last the great conflict came, Eng- 
land and Liberty would have been confronted, not by a de- 
pleted antagonist, still feeble from the exhaustion of a starved 
and persecuted infancy, but by an athletic champion of the 
principles of Richelieu and Loyola." While the Iroquois 
blocked the Englishman's way to the West, they also turned 
the Frenchman aside from the St. Lawrence and the Lower 
Lakes to the Ottawa and Nipissing; they ruined the fur trade, 
" which was the life-blood of New France;" they "made all 
her early years a misery and a terror ; " they retarded the 
growth of Absolutism until Liberty was equal to the final 
struggle ; and they influence our national history to this day, 
since " populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal 
monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile 
to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and 
a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of 
which America is the field." ' 

Etienne Brule, who had served Champlain as an inter- 
preter in his journey to the " Mer Douce," was the first to 
penetrate the region beyond that body of water. This he 
did before 1629, bringing back with him an ingot of copper 
and a description of a lake that well fits Lake Superior, 
its size, length, and the rapids by which it discharges its 
v/aters. 

In 1634 Jean Nicollet, a hardy explorer and trained woods- 
man, passed through the Straits of Mackinaw, discovered Lake 
Michigan, and made his way to Green Bay. He remained 
in this region a year, during which time he heard much of a 
" great water " to the west that he took to be the sea, but 
which was really the Mississippi River. He appears to have 
been on the Wisconsin, for he says if he had paddled three 
days more he should have reached the sea. 

In 1 64 1 Fathers Jogues and Raymbault preached to two 

' The Jesuits in North America, 446-449. 



26 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

thousand Indians, Ojibwas and others, at the Saut Sainte 
Marie. 

In 1659-1660 Grosselliers and Radisson reached the head 
of the great Lake, and visited Indians dwelling among the 
streams and lakes of Western Wisconsin and Eastern Minne- 
sota. They also visited the country beyond Lake Superior, 
and were the first to give the world information of those for- 
midable tribes, the Sioux. 

In 1 66 1 Father Menard and Jean Guerin penetrated the 
LTpper Peninsula of Michigan, leaving Lake Superior at 
Keweenaw Bay. Their lines of travel are lost in history, as 
their footsteps are in the wilderness, but some writers sup- 
pose that they actually found the Mississippi. 

The French had now discovered, and in this order, -four of 
the Great Lakes : Huron, Ontario, Superior, and Michigan. 
From the day that he found the " Mer Douce," Champlain 
probably conjectured that its waters mingled with those of 
the Ottawa under the rock of Quebec ; but years elapsed be- 
fore the connection was thoroughly established. The Father 
of New France laid down a connection on his map of 1632, 
representing Lake Erie as a widened river ; but on some maps 
of later date the Upper and Lower Lakes are wholly discon- 
nected. In fact, the Susquehanna was once thought to be 
an outlet of Lake Erie. This lake was the very last to be 
discovered, as well as the very last to be thoroughly explored. 
It was known to the French as early as 1640, but we have no 
certain information of its navigation, nor of the river connect- 
ing it with Lake Huron, until 1669. In that year Louis 
Joliet, who ranks as an explorer next to Champlain and La 
Salle, returning from Lake Superior, where he had gone in 
quest of copper, made the passage and sailed along the north- 
ern shore to the eastward. At least, in September of that 
year we find Joliet, La Salle, and two Sulpitian priests in the 
woods of Grand River, between Lakes Erie and Ontario, dis- 
cussing geography, trade, and Indian conversions. Adopting 
Joilet's advice, the Sulpitians concluded to go by the new 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 2/ 

route to the far-distant Fottawatomics. In 1670 they as- 
cended the Strait, stopping on the site of Detroit, and made 
their way to the Saut Sainte Marie. These priests were Gal- 
inee and DoUier, the first of whom made the earliest map of 
the Upper Lakes now known to exist. 

Thus, from 161 5 to 1670, while the English colonists were 
treading the paths of their hard practical life, making farms 
and towns, fighting the Indians, and contending with the 
home government for rights and privileges, the French were 
laying open the Northwestern lands and waters, but making 
no use of Lake Erie in carrying on their hardy operations. 
The reasons of this are essential to the meaning of our 
story. Le Caron and Champlain had found Lake Huron by 
ascending the Ottawa, and had thus set the direction of 
Northwestern travel. Later, however, the route by Lake Sim- 
coe was more frequently used by the Jesuits and fur traders. 
The base of the great triangle forming Southwestern Canada 
was shorter than the two sides. Moreover, the Ottawa route 
was not much harder than the one by the lake. The voyagcur 
or the priest made his way along either route in a birch-bark 
canoe, and carr}'ing over the portages, or around the rapids, 
while more laborious than paddling, still broke the monotony 
of what was at best a wearisome life. But more than all the 
rest, the Northern route was far less dangerous. It lay through 
the country of the friendly Algonquins and Hurons, while 
the hostile Iroquois wholly barred or made very perilous the 
portage of the Niagara. Had it not been for the great river 
that discharges its floods into the St. Lawrence opposite the 
island of Montreal, Northwestern discovery would have been 
retarded for half a century. The site of Detroit, the best on 
the Lakes for the purposes of the French, owing to its water- 
transportation, its relations to the Indians, and its neighbor- 
hood to the beaver-grounds, was not known until 1669, and 
not occupied until 1701 ; and then the finder and the founder 
came from Canada by the Ottawa and Lake Huron. 

The same facts explain another curious surprise in the 



28 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

early history of this region. The territory comprised within 
the present State of Ohio was the last portion of the North- 
west to be explored and claimed by the French. French 
maps that lay down the far northern waters with much 
correctness, leave us almost wholly ignorant of the size and 
configuration of Lake Erie. Maps that correctly figure the 
rivers of Canada and of Illinois make the Ohio and the Wabash 
one stream, called " Wabash or Ohio," flowing from its source 
almost due west, and thus nearly obliterating the State of 
Ohio. Sometimes Lake Erie runs south far toward the Gulf 
of Mexico ; and later its course is due east and west. Charle- 
voix's map of 1744 bears on the southern side of the lake the 
words, " this shore is almost unknown," and Celoron's map of 
1750 repeats the legend. Evans's and Mitchell's maps, both 
published in 1755, give the lake an almost east and w^est 
trend. It was at this time that the rivers of Ohio made their 
first appearance in cartography. The similar streams of Illinois 
and Wisconsin had long been known and mapped. " The 
great geographer, D'Anville of France, in 1755, lays down the 
Beaver, with the Mahoning from the west, rising in a lake, all 
very incorrectly, with Lake Erie rising to the northeast like a 
pair of stairs, and the Ohio nearly parallel to it.'" Last of 
all, when the Connecticut Land Company sent its surveyors 
to Ohio, in 1796, it found, to its surprise and financial loss, 
that the Connecticut Western Reserve contained a million 
acres less land than had been supposed. The company should 
have charged the shortage to the Alleghany Mountains and 
the Iroquois : the mountains blocked the Englishman's path 
to the West, while the Iroquois, who exterminated the Eries 
about 1660, and whose hunting and war parties long roamed 
the waste that they had made, rendered the farthest extreme 
of the Northwest much safer ground than Ohio for the 7'oj'a- 
geiirs, traders, and missionaries of France. Besides, the shorter 



^ Hon. C. C. Baldwin, from whose tracts, published by the Western Reserve 
Historical Society, these facts are mainly gathered. 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 29 

distance by the northern shore drew the travel to that side of 
the Lake. 

Wherever they went the French took prudent thought for 
the morrow, June 14, 1 671, Saint-Lusson, who had been sent 
from Canada for that verj^ purpose, standing amid a throng of 
savages and a cluster of Frenchmen, by a white cross and a 
cedar post bearing the royal arms, that had been raised at the 
foot of the Saut Rapids, holding a sword in one hand and a clod 
of earth in the other, with religious and civil ceremonies, took 
possession of the Saut, the Lakes Huron and Superior, with 
all the countries, rivers, lakes, and islands contiguous and ad- 
jacent thereto, both those already discovered and those yet to 
be discovered, bounded on the one side by the seas of the 
north and west, and on the other by the South Sea, in the 
name of the High, Mighty, and Redoubtable Monarch, Louis 
XIV., the Most Christian King of France and Navarre. All 
that " now remains of the sovereignty thus pompously pro- 
claimed," says Mr. Parkman, is " now and then the accents of 
France on the lips of some straggling boatman or vagabond 
half-breed — this, and nothing more." ' 

jNIeantime, the Jesuits, not cast down by the loss of the 
Huron ]\Iission, were busy planting missions in the country 
beyond " ^ler Douce." 

The two most important of these missions, standing to the 
wilderness in some such relation as that of the early Christian 
monasteries of Western Europe to the surrounding heathen- 
ism, were those of Saut Sainte Marie and Saint-Esprit, the 
latter near the head of Lake Superior. The common rally- 
ing-points of Indians and Frenchmen alike, these missions be- 
came centres of real geographical information as well as of 
idle rumor and vague conjecture. Only a man who has 
brought his imagination to bear on the facts of wilderness life 
can conceive what was then going on. At any given time, 
some French discoverer might be paddling his canoe along 

' La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 42-44. 



30 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

some unknown river, or toiling through some unknown forest, 
hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement or mission ; 
and report of what he saw or did might be many months in 
finding its way to his countrymen. The yearly reports of the 
Jesuit missions, called " Relations," now that the Jesuits have 
become more secular and less spiritual, abound in natural 
knowledge,^ which shows that the priests were grappling with 
the new questions that thronged upon the dullest minds, and 
that the brightest could not answer. Father Marquette had 
been stationed at Saint-Esprit, where he heard much of the 
mysterious river to find which had become the ambition of 
every ambitious Frenchman in New France. 

La Salle came out to Canada at the age of twenty-three in 
1666, burning with the great passion of the Age of Maritime 
Discovery — the thought of finding a western road to the 
riches of the East. Of all the men who shed lustre upon 
French discovery in New France, La Salle alone ranks beside 
Champlain. A band of Seneca Indians who Avintered with 
him at his seigniory of La Chine, on the shore of Lake St. 
Louis, in one of the lulls of savage warfare, told him of a 
river called the Ohio that rose in their country and, at a dis- 
tance of an eight moons' journey, emptied into the sea. Re- 
sponding to that prepossession which leads men of ardent tem- 
per to interpret facts in the light of favorite theories and 
cherished purposes, he concluded that this river must flow to 
the Gulf of California. He had started with the Sulpitian 
priests on a journey to the Ohio, resolved to put this theory 
to the test, when by accident he met Joliet in the wilder- 
ness of Grand River. One of the questions that the little 
company discussed was that of a road to the great river 
of which the French were now hearing so much, from tribes 
as distant as the Senecas and the Sioux. Joliet, who had be- 
come familiar with the reports that floated to the missions of 
the LTpper Lakes, contended that the road should be sought in 

' Parkman : I-a Salle, 29. 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 3 1 

the Northwest ; La Salle, who was fresh from his conference 
with the Senecas, contended as earnestly for the Southwest. 
Joliet went on his way to Montreal. Galinee and Dollier, 
turned from their former purpose by his arguments, ascended 
the Strait of Detroit. La Salle, with his few followers, was 
left alone in the wilderness — alone, but not shaken in his pur- 
pose. Owing to the lack of original documents, and to the 
confusion of second-hand reports, the next two or three years 
of his life are wrapped in much obscurity, and are the subject 
of much vehement debate ; but it is now generally held that 
in those years La Salle discovered the Ohio, descending it to 
the Falls at Louisville, perhaps even to the Mississippi. But 
this conclusion, while no doubt sound, is reached by cautious 
criticism of fragmentary documents. La Salle's discovery in 
no sense made the Ohio known to the world, and the region 
between the lake and the river remained to be explored as 
late as the year 1750. There is some evidence going to show 
that in this obscure passage of his life La Salle descended the 
Illinois to the Mississippi. But History has adjudged the 
honor of discovering the great river to others, and she is not 
likely to change her verdict. 

Plainly, the time had come for the Mississippi to be dis- 
covered ; and in 1672 Frontenac, the French governor, com- 
missioned Joliet to make the discovery. At Mackinaw the 
intrepid explorer met the intrepid priest whose name will ever 
be associated with his own in Western annals. At the out- 
set Marquette placed the enterprise under the patronage of 
the Immaculate Virgin, promising that if she granted them 
success the river should be named " The Conception." This 
pledge he strove to keep ; but an Indian word, the very mean- 
ing of which has been disputed, is its designation. Ascend- 
ing the Fox River, crossing the portage to the Wisconsin, one 
of the most remote from Canada of the many portages unit- 
ing the two systems of waters, and then descending the Wis- 
consin, on June 17, 1673, they found themselves, probably 
first of white men since De Soto's companions fled from the 



32 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

midnight burial of their chief, on the bosom of the Father of 
Waters. We shall not follow them as they descend the 
mighty flood to a point below the mouth of the Arkansas. 
Having satisfied themselves that the river did not flow to the 
sea of Virginia or to the Gulf of California, but to the Gulf of 
Mexico, they turned back toward the north, and, by way of 
the Illinois River, the Chicago portage, and Lake Michigan, 
returned to Green Bay, having paddled their canoes, in four 
months, two thousand five hundred miles. Jolict lived many 
years to encounter new perils, among them a journey by the 
Saguenay to Hudson Bay ; but Marquette, worn out by labors 
and vigils, soon after died on the lonely eastern shore of Lake 
Michigan. 

La Salle's ambition became more ardent the longer it Avas 
fed by his glowing imagination. But the triumph of Joliet 
and Marquette changed the current of his thoughts. Asia 
was no longer the vision that he saw in the west, but the Mis- 
sissippi Valley. Spain had discovered the Mississippi, but 
had failed to take possession : he would fortify its mouth and 
hold the river against the world. England had planted her 
colonies on the Atlantic shore, claiming the whole continent 
behind ■ them : he would gain their rear and shut the gate- 
ways of the West against them forever. In a word, he would 
change the seat of the French-American empire from the St. 
Lawrence to the INIississippi. It was La Salle who first dis- 
tinctly conceived the policy that led on to Fort Duquesne, 
Braddock's defeat, and Forbes's march to the Forks of the 
Ohio. 

Early in the year 1679, he built, near the foot of Lake Erie, 
the Griffin, a vessel of sixty tons burden, to be used in the 
prosecution of his plans. Money was needed, and he must sup- 
ply it by trading in furs. August 7th the Griffin spread her 
sails for the Northern waters. She was the first craft other 
than an Indian canoe or a boat propelled by oars that ever 
sailed our inland seas above Lake Ontario. On the 12th of 
that month she had reached the expansion of the Strait that 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 33 

lies just above the city of Detroit. Unlike the Protestant ex- 
plorers, the Catholic drew largely upon the Saints' calendar 
for geographical names ; and the school-boy of to-day, as he 
pores over the map of North America, finds in the names of 
rivers, lakes, and capes valuable hints of early exploration. 
Of this we have an excellent example in the naming of Lake 
Sainte-Claire. 



" The saint whose name was really bestowed, and whose day 
is August 1 2th, is the female ' Sainte Claire,' the foundress of 
the order of Franciscan nuns of the thirteenth century, known 
as ' Poor Claires.' Clara d'Assisi was the beautiful daughter 
of a nobleman of great wealth, who early dedicated herself to a 
religious life and went to St. Francis to ask for advice. On 
Palm Sunday she went to church with her family, dressed in 
rich attire, where St. Francis cut off her long hair with his own 
hands and threw over her the coarse penitential robes of the 
order. She entered the convent of San Damiano in spite of the 
opposition of her family and friends. It is related of her that 
on one occasion, when the Saracens came to ravage the con- 
vent, she arose from her bed, where she had been, long con- 
fined, and placing the pyx, which contained the host, upon the 
threshold, she knelt down and began to sing, whereupon the 
infidels threw down their arms and fled. Sancta Clara is a 
favorite saint all over Europe, and her fame in the New World 
ought not to be spoiled — like the record of the dead in a battle 
gazette — by a misspelt name. 

" F. Way, in his work on Rome, published in 1875, says : 
' Sancta Clara has her tomb at the Minerva, and she dwelt be- 
tween the Pantheon and the Tlicrnice of Agrippa. The tene- 
ment she occupied at the time of her decease still exists, but is 
not well known. In a little triangular place on or near Via 
Tor. Argentina lodged the first convent of the Clarisses. If, 
crossing the gate-way, you turn to the left of the court, you will 
face two windows of a slightly raised ground-floor. It was 
there Innocent IV. visited her, and there, on August 12, 1253, 
listening to the reading of the Passion, in the midst of her weep- 
3 



34 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ing nuns, died the first abbess of the Clarisses and the founder 
of 4,000 religious houses.'" ' 

The lake named, the Griffin went on her way. From 
Green Bay, La Salle sent her on the return voyage loaded 
with furs. She was never heard of again, to La Salle's most 
bitter disappointment. What was her fate will always be a 
matter of conjecture. 

Who were the first white men to penetrate the territory of 
Illinois, probably can never be told with certainty. It is 
clear that the Illinois River had been visited by white men 
before Joliet and Marquette ascended it on their way north- 
ward in 1673. At least, there is a map in existence of earlier 
date on which the upper parts of the river are laid down.^ 
Perhaps the readiest answer to the question that this map sug- 
gests is, that La Salle actually discovered the Illinois in 1672. 
Marquette returned to the Indian town of Kaskaskia after his 
first visit, to establish the mission of the Immaculate Concep- 
tion, but his stay was of short duration. La Salle's eye was 
on the Illinois when he ascended the Lakes in 1679. Part of 
the Griffin's cargo was rigging and anchors for a vessel to be 
built on that river, with which, he expected to sail down the 
Mississippi and make the West Indies. When he parted with 
his vessel at Green Bay, he ascended Lake Michigan, and 
built Fort Miamis at the mouth, or near the mouth, of the 
St. Joseph River. Ascending this river to the Kankakee port- 
age, in December, he crossed to that stream, and launched 
his eight canoes, containing thirty-three men, himself, Tonty, 
and Hennepin included, on its current. Passing places soon 
to become memorable in Western annals, as " Starved Rock " 
and Peoria Lake, he finally stopped at a point just below the 
lake and began a fortification that, borrowing the name from 
a fortress in Brabant, which had recently fallen into the hands 
of the French, he called Crevecoeur. The name, meaning 

1 Hubbard: Memorials of a Half Century, 164-166. 

2 Parkman: La Salle, 23. 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 35 

Broken Heart, fitly marked the desperation of his fortunes. 
Hitlierto he had refused to believe tliat the Griffin was lost, 
b.ut hope now grew faint. But neither his ardent tempera- 
ment nor the state of his aftairs would permit him to stand 
still. So, dispatching Father Hennepin to the Upper Missis- 
sippi, and leaving Tonty with a few men in command of the 
post, he started on a long winter's journey to Canada, to pro- 
cure materials for the completion of a small vessel that he 
had put upon the stocks at Crevecoeur. On this journey he 
crossed the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, being probably the 
first white man to do so. In Canada fresh disappointments 
awaited him, and when he returned to Illinois in November, 
1680, he found his fort plundered and deserted. In an Iro- 
quois foray it had been taken and its garrison dispersed. 

In the autumn of 168 1, La Salle once more travelled the 
long road leading from the St. Lawrence to the head of the 
" Lake of the Illinois," as he called Lake Michigan. The 
winter" following, he dragged his canoes on sledges to the Illi- 
nois River, and then launched them on its stream. On Feb- 
ruary 6, 1682, he found himself on the river that he had so 
long sought, and which fate seemed to have decreed that he 
should never reach. April 9th following, he and his little 
party stood just above the mouth of the Mississippi, beside a 
column bearing the arms of France, with an appropriate in- 
scription, and a cross, with a leaden plate, also appropriately 
inscribed, buried near. Some hymns having been chanted, 
amid volleys of musketry and. shouts of " Long live the King " 
La Salle took formal possession, for his royal master King 
Louis XIV. of France and Navarre, of the country of Louisi- 
ana, from the mouth of the Ohio along the Mississippi and 
the rivers which flow into it from its source beyond the coun- 
try of the Sioux to its mouth at the sea, and also to the 
mouth of the River of Palms. Another hymn was chanted, 
and renewed shouts of " Live the King ! "completed the trans- 
action. 

This act was far more significant than the similar one per- 



36 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

formed by Saint-Lusson at the Saut, eleven years before. It 
closed the Mississippi to the Spaniards for one hundred years; 
it led to a French colony in Louisiana ; it made necessary 
that chain of wilderness posts which Braddock sought to 
pierce at the Forks of the Ohio in 1755. That the Missis- 
sippi Valley was laid open to the eyes of the world by a z'oy- 
ageiir who came overland from Canada, and not by a voyagciir 
who ploughed through the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico 
from Spain, is a fact of far-reaching import. The first Louisiana 
was the whole valley ; this and the Lake-St. Lawrence Basin 
made up the second New France. How the two blended and 
supplemented each other geographically, as well as their first 
historical relations, have been indicated. Before we lose sight 
of the act that La Salle performed that April day we should 
mark the date that fixes its relation to the English colonies 
— -1682, the year that Penn laid out the squares of Philadel- 
phia, but thirty-four years before Spotswood and his retinue 
drank their wine on the banks of the Shenandoah. 

Our present theme is the discovery of the Northwest. 
Other matters have been introduced only as they lead up to 
that grand result. But French ambition was not absorbed 
by the Mississippi problem. Frenchmen pushed into the 
great forests and plains beyond the sources of that river. In 
the seventeenth century, they knew the " thousand lakes " of 
Minnesota better than Americans knew them sixty years ago. 
Du Lhut, for whom the terminus of the Northern Pacific 
Railroad is named, before the year 1700 explored much of 
the region through which that railroad runs. Nor have we 
attempted more than an outline map of the earliest history of 
the Old Northwest. Having done so much — having indi- 
cated how the French, long before the English reached the 
foot-hills of the Alleghanies, had crossed and threaded the 
great Western Valley, we are ready to attempt a similar map 
of early Northwestern colonization. 

But before essaying that task, a word concerning the en- 



THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST. 17 

chanting tale of French discovery in North America. As we 
read that tale, we seem, for the time, to be looking out of the 
wondering eyes with which the French first surveyed this new 
northern and western world — the eyes of Cartier as he sailed 
up the St. Lawrence ; of Champlain as he paddled his bark 
canoe up the current of the Richelieu or shouldered it around 
the rapids of the Ottawa; of Nicollet as he steered through the 
Straits of Mackinaw into the expanse of Lake Michigan; of 
Joliet as he rowed beneath the cliffs of the Saguenay — the 
eyes of Brule at the Saut, of Hennepin at Niagara, of Mar- 
quette on the River of Conception, of Du Lhut in the coun- 
try of the Dakotas — the eyes of La Salle as he descended the 
Ohio, followed the Indian trails of Illinois and Arkansas, or 
pronounced that sounding formula at the mouth of the Mis- 
sissippi — we seem to look out of their eyes upon this virgin 
world of forest and stream, of prairie and lake, of buffalo and 
elk, of natural beauty and human ugliness. But, after all, 
our impressions are faint compared with theirs. Ideal pres- 
ence is not real presence. Even if we could follow them on 
their old paths, we could not undo the great changes that civ- 
ilized man has wrought. Nor can we recall the innocency of 
their eyes any more than we can renew the devotion of their 
hearts to King and Church. All that is possible for us is a 
pale picture of as grand a panorama of natural beauty and 
sublimity as was ever unrolled to the vision of explorers. To 
men like Champlain, Marquette, and La Salle, exploring New 
France was a poem whose splendor almost made them forget 
the hardships and perils of the exploration. 



IV. 

THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 

The English colonies in America began with villages and 
outlying farms ; the French colonies, with missionary stations, 
fortified posts, or trading houses, or with the three combined. 
The triple alliance of priest, soldier, and trader continued 
through the period of colonization. Often, but not always, 
settlements grew up around these missions or posts ; and these 
settlements constituted the colonies of New France. 

Immediately following the visit of Le Caron and Cham- 
plain to the " Mer Douce," in 1615, the Recollet Fathers es- 
tablished missions on its eastern side, which, however, soon 
passed into the hands of the Jesuits, These missions were 
stepping-stones to the regions beyond. The reader who has 
followed the narrative thus far will not be surprised to learn 
that the French beginnings in the Northwest were within the 
Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Some of these beginnings 
long ago disappeared, others became permanent settlements. 
Saint-Esprit, at La Pointe, planted by Allouez in 1665, is one 
example of the first ; Saut Ste. Marie, planted by Marquette 
in 1668, of the second. This village is the oldest town in the 
Northwest — fourteen years older than Philadelphia, and one 
hundred and twenty years older than Marietta, O. A mis- 
sion was planted on the island of Michilimackinac within a 
year of that at the Saut. This establishment was soon re- 
moved to Pointe St. Ignace, on the mainland, to the north 
and west, and afterward to the northern point of the South- 
ern Peninsula. But we are not able to trace a continuous 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 39 

history from the mission to the Mackinaw of the fisherman 
and tourist of to-day. 

The beginnings made in Lower Michigan bear such im- 
portant relations to facts of larger moment that time must be 
taken to point them out. 

In previous chapters I have spoken of the English colo- 
nists as contented with their prosaic life, and as not seeking to 
enter the regions beyond the Mountains and the Lakes. This 
requires some qualification. Within the State of New York 
are the Hudson and the Mohawk Rivers. The Dutch, hav- 
ing a passion for beaver equal to that of the French them- 
seh'es, early occupied the confluence of the two streams, and 
then began throwing out advanced settlements along the line 
of the smaller one. The English conquest of the Dutch 
colony did not at once change its character. Furs long con- 
tinued the leading staple of its commerce. The two rivers pre- 
sented the readiest means of reaching the West found south of 
the St. Lawrence. From the very first, the people of New 
York cultivated good feeling and commercial relations with 
their neighbors of the " Long House ; " and these, whether in 
peace or war, were able to influence all the tribes to the very 
sources of the Mississippi. After they had crushed the 
Hurons, these intractable warriors claimed Southwestern 
Canada as their own ; and after their Western conquests they 
set up a claim to all the lands to the Mississippi, south of the 
southern boundary of Michigan. No nation was ever more 
jealous than the Six Nations ; but the skilful diplomatists of 
New York succeeded in winning from them many valuable 
concessions, some of which they did and some of which they 
did not understand. These will be more fully noticed in an- 
other place ; but here it is important to remark that after the 
colony had passed into English hands, they sometimes per- 
mitted the New York traders to pass through their country 
to the Lakes. Once on the shore of Lake Erie, the traders 
were but a few days' paddling from the best beaver-grounds in 
the whole Northwest — those of the lower Michigan Peninsula. 



40 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" The region between Lake Eric and Saginaw was one of 
the great beaver-trapping grounds. The Huron, the Chippe- 
was, the Ottawas, and even the Iroquois, from beyond Ontario, 
by turns sought this region in large parties for the capture of 
this game, from tire earliest historic times. It is a region pe- 
culiarly adapted to the wants of this animal. To a great ex- 
tent level, it is intersected by numerous water-courses, which 
have but moderate flow. At the head-waters and small inlets 
of these streams the beaver established his colonies. Here 
he dammed the streams, setting back the water over the flat 
lands, and creating ponds, in which were his habitations. Not 
one or two, but a series of such dams, were constructed along 
each stream, so that very extensive surfaces became thus covered 
permanently with the flood. The trees were killed, and the 
land was converted into a chain of ponds and marshes, with in- 
tervening dry ridges. In time, by nature's recuperative process 
— the annual growth and decay of grasses and aquatic plants — 
these filled with muck or peat, with occasional deposits of bog- 
lime, and the ponds and swales became dry again. 

"Illustrations of this beaver-made country are numerous 
enough in our immediate vicinity. In a semicircle of twelve 
miles around Detroit, having the river for base, and embracing 
about one hundred thousand acres, fully one-fifth part consists 
of marshy tracts or prairies, which had their origin in the work 
of the beaver. A little farther west, nearly one whole township, 
in Wayne County, is of this character."' 

Such temptation as this the Dutch and English traders 
could not be expected to resist. When Denonville came to 
Canada as governor, in 1685, he found New France beset on 
either side. The English of Hudson Bay were seeking to 
draw the trade of the Northwestern tribes to those northern 
waters ; the English of New York were seeking to draw it to 
Hudson River. The competition threatened to become too 
keen ; for the Englishman offered cheaper goods, and the Ind- 
ians liked his rum as well as they did the Frenchman's brandy. 

' Hubbard : Memorials of a Half Century, 362-363. 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 41 

But, more than this, Governor Dongan of New York had 
divined the ideas of La Salle, and had begun to counterwork 
them. He proposed that the English should enter the West, 
exclude the French, and limit them to the St. Lawrence. It 
was a war of ideas. It was at this time that New York ob- 
tained from the Iroquois the first of those concessions which 
afterward played so important a part in English policy, and 
became the basis of the New York claim to the Western coun- 
try. The two mother countries were at peace ; but Denon- 
ville and Dongan conducted a long correspondence growing 
out of the rival claims, often angry, sometimes bitter. The 
French governor sometimes despaired of his cause, although 
he triumphed in the end. The Iroquois were never friendly to 
the French, and often hostile ; and they now strove to alien- 
ate the Northwestern tribes from them. But Denonville had 
some great advantages over his rival. He was absolute in 
Canada, and was thoroughly supported by his king, while 
Dongan was wholly unsupported. The English king was a 
creature of Louis XIV. 's, and the colonies other than New 
York, although Dongan was upholding their common cause, 
were wholly indifferent to the issue. Still he might have won 
but for one force that he was powerless to overcome : he had 
no weapon that he could oppose to the French coureurs des 
bois. These redoubtable bush-rangers, always proud of their 
French blood and language, and always impatient of French 
authority; devoted to the King, but caring nothing for his 
law ; leading a life picturesque and reckless ; with the bravery 
and generosity of the traditional outlaw ; familiar with every 
stream and at home in every forest ; delighting in illicit trade ; 
often under the ban of the governor ; ready to confess them- 
selves or quick to shed blood ; rapidly succumbing to the 
hardships and dangers of their irregular life, but still more 
rapidly recruited from the settlements — the coiircurs des bois 
now rendered to New France one of their greatest services. 
They had become so numerous that every family in Canada 
was said to have a member in the bush. They had great in- 



42 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

fluence with the Indians ; they hated the English ; and they 
were often envied by their countrymen who followed more 
orderly lives. They had their own leaders, some of whom 
could bring together five or six hundred men, Du Lhut was 
the most celebrated of these, and in this first crisis of North- 
western history he played a conspicuous part. He built a 
fort on the northern side of Lake Superior, to control the 
road from the Upper Lakes to Hudson Bay. He also pointed 
out to Denonville the importance of closing the gate-way of 
Detroit. The governor gave him a commission to close it, 
which Du Lhut hastened to execute. In 1686 he built Fort 
St. Joseph, at the head of the Strait, near where Fort Gratiot 
afterward stood. St. Joseph was abandoned and destroyed 
soon after, but not until a fort had been built on the site of 
Detroit. This action had not been taken a moment too soon, 
for immediately we hear of men from New York on their way 
to Mackinaw. In 1686 and 1687 strong parties of English 
and Dutch traders, escorted by Iroquois warriors, made this 
attempt ; the first of these had actually passed St. Joseph be- 
fore it was discovered and captured, the second was stopped 
on Lake Erie. Nor did the English then give over the at- 
tempt to penetrate the upper country ; we hear afterward of 
New York traders at various places, and notably in the neigh- 
borhood of Fort Miamis, on the St. Joseph, in 1694. But 
building and garrisoning forts were only a part of the ser- 
vices rendered in this trying time by the courcurs dcs bois. 
They placated the Indians, and patrolled the forests and lakes 
for stray Englishmen. So competent an authority as Judge 
Campbell expresses the opinion that but for them the Michi- 
gan region would have fallen into English hands before the 
close of the seventeenth century.' But before the Strait of 
Detroit was occupied by the French, plantings had already 
been made farther to the west. 

From the time of La Salle's visit in 1679, we can trace a 

' Political History of Michigan, 40. 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 43 

continuous French occupation of Illinois. After La Salle had 
navigated the great river to the Gulf, he had a double-headed 
scheme. First, he would plant a colony on the Illinois to 
hold the country against the Six Nations, who extended their 
forays to the Mississippi, to protect the Western Indians, and 
to gather furs. A second colony, planted at the mouth of the 
Mississippi, would command Lower Louisiana and receive 
and ship to France the furs gathered on the upper waters. 
He would bind together the two colonies by a chain of forti- 
fied posts, which should also be continued through the Lake 
country to the settlements on the St. Lawrence. He now 
changed the scene of his northern operations. He planted 
his citadel of St. Louis on the summit of " Starved Rock," 
proposing to make that the centre of his colony. This un- 
dertaking well under way, he started for France to carry out 
the second part of his programme. Further we shall not fol- 
low this indomitable explorer, except to say that in 1687, 
while seeking, by an overland journey to Canada, to save from 
destruction his Southern colony, that, either by mistake or 
treachery, had been landed in Texas rather than at the mouth 
of the Mississippi, he was slain by an assassin of his own party, 
just one hundred years before Anglo-American institutions 
were established in the territory that he had called his own. 
La Salle was the father of Illinois. At first his colony was 
exceedingly feeble, but it was never discontinued. " Joutel 
found a garrison at Fort St. Louis ... in 1687, and in 
1689 La Hontan bears testimony that it still continued. In 
1696 a public document proves its existence ; and when Tonty, 
in 1700, again descended the Mississippi, he was attended by 
twenty Canadians, residents on the Illinois." ' Even while 
the wars named after King William and Queen Anne were 
going on, the French settlements were growing in numbers 
and increasing in size ; those wars over, they made still more 
rapid progress. Missions grew into settlements and parishes. 



' Monette : History of the Mississippi Valley, i., 153, 154. 



44 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Old Kaskaskia was begun in what La Salle called the " ter- 
restrial paradise " before the close of the seventeenth century. 

The Wabash Valley w^as occupied about 1700, the first set- 
tlers entering it by the portage leading from the Kankakee. 
Later the voyageiirs found a shorter route to the fertile val- 
ley. Ascending the Maumee, then called " The Miami of the 
Lake," whose heads are interlaced with those of the Wabash, 
and crossing the short portage leading to that stream, they 
could descend to the Ohio. As the Frenchmen found their 
way to the confluence of the two streams by the Wabash, and 
as they knew little of the Ohio, then called " the River of the 
Iroquois," they took the Wabash for the main stream. 
Post Vincents, the Vincennes of our maps, was planted in 
1735, and became the principal of a long but thin line of set- 
tlements. 

The nearest road from Canada to the Mississippi lies 
through the State of Ohio, the most remote through the State 
of Wisconsin ; the Ohio portages were the last to be travelled 
by the French, that of the Fox and the Wisconsin was the 
first. The Iroquois long excluded the French from Ohio, and 
the remoteness of Wisconsin, aided perhaps by the rigor of the 
climate, tended to a similar result. Still, the Jesuits planted 
several missions in the latter State. That of St. Francis 
Xavier, planted by Claude Allouez, the founder of Saint-Es- 
prit, at Green Bay, in 1669, was the most important, and be- 
came, in course of time, the nucleus of a small French settle- 
ment. Mention may also be made of Prairie du Chien and 
of the post on Lake Pepin. 

The French located their principal missions and posts with 
admirable judgment. There is not one of them in which we 
cannot see the wisdom of the priest, of the soldier, and the 
trader combined. The triple alliance worked for an imme- 
diate end, but the sites that they chose are as important to- 
day as they were when they chose them. The fact is, Nature 
had decided all these questions ages before the soil of the New 
World had been pressed by the white man's foot. Marquette 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 45 

called the Straits of Mackinaw " the key, and, as it were, 
the gate for all the tribes from the South as the Saut is for 
those of the North, there being in this section of the country- 
only these two passages by water, for a great number of na- 
tions have to go by one or other of these channels in order 
to reach the French settlements. This presents a peculiarly 
favorable opportunity both for instructing those who pass here 
and also for obtaining easy access and conveyance to their 
places of abode," The straits were called the " home of the 
fishes." " Elsewhere, although they exist in large numbers," 
says Marquette, " it is not properly their home, which is in 
the neighborhood of Michilimackinac. It is this attraction 
which has heretofore drawn to a point so advantageous the 
greater part of the savages in this country, driven away by 
fear of the Iroquois," ' La Salle's colony of St. Louis was 
planted in one of the gardens of the world, in the midst of 
a numerous Indian population, on the great line of travel 
between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. Kaskas- 
kia and the neighboring settlements held the centre of the 
long line extending from Canada to Louisiana. The Wabash 
colony commanded that valley and the Lower Ohio. De- 
troit was a position so important that, securely held by the 
French, it practically banished from the English mind for 
fifty years the thought of acquiring the Northwest. The 
Indians and the beavers have long since disappeared from 
the region lying between the lakes and the Mississippi ; that 
region has twice changed hands since those early days ; the 
whole country has been transformed by the hand of man; 
but the Saut Canal, the Mackinaw shipping, and the cities of 
Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit show us how geography con- 
ditions history, as well as that the savage and the civilized 
man have much in common. Then how unerringly were the 
French guided to the carrying places between the Northern 
and the Southern waters, viz., Green Bay, Fox River, and 

' Cooley : Michigan, in Commonwealth Series, ii. 



46 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the Wisconsin ; the Chicago River and the Illinois ; the St. 
Joseph and the Kankakee ; the St. Joseph and the Wabash ; 
the Maumee and the Wabash ; and, later, on the eve of the 
war that gave New France to England, the Chautauqua and 
French Creek routes from Lake Erie to the Ohio. 

Much of this work was done while hostilities were in 
progress. About the time that King William's War began, 
in 1689, Governors Dongan and Denonville were both recalled. 
No English governor or commander succeeded to Dongan's 
ideas, while Count Frontenac vigorously prosecuted the pol- 
icy of La Salle. In America the advantage of the war lay de- 
cidedly with the French. The Iroquois never recovered from 
the blows that Frontenac dealt them. The Northwestern 
Indians were more completely wedded to the French interest. 
Louisiana was colonized. Posts and settlements connecting 
the mouths of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi were es- 
tablished. The Strait of Detroit was guarded by a fortified 
post. The Treaty of Ryswick, that will be more fully char- 
acterized in another place, left all colonial disputes to future 
wars. The English challenge to the discoverers of the West 
was hurled back beyond the mountains, there to lie until re- 
newed a half-century later. But the challenge had been 
given, and was sure to be renewed ; and it is very probable 
that, if a statesman having the genius of William Pitt had 
then directed British counsels, British ascendancy in the 
Western country would have been established during the 
progress of King William's War. 

Still New York did not at once resign her Western plans 
and aspirations. In 1701 the Iroquois conveyed to King 
William III. all their claims to the country formerly occu- 
pied by the Hurons. These were the lands bounded by 
Lakes Ontario, Huron, and Erie, " containing in length about 
800 miles, and in breadth 400 miles, including the country 
where beavers and all sorts of wild game keeps." ' The Iro- 



' Campbell : Political History of Michigan, 57. 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 47 

quois did not lay claim to the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, 
but this grant nevertheless covered Detroit or " Fort De 
Tret," as the deed calls it. Nor did the French feel alto- 
gether easy. La Motte Cadillac, afterward governor of Louisi- 
ana, who had for some time seen that the fort at Detroit was 
no longer adequate, recommended a settlement. Receiving 
little encouragement in Canada, he carried his plan across the 
ocean. He returned with authority from the minister Pon- 
chartrain to carry it out. Cadillac came to the spot, July 24, 
1 701, with fifty' soldiers and fifty artisans and tradesmen, a 
Jesuit missionary, and a Recollet chaplain. He built a fort, 
which he named Ponchartrain, for the French minister, and 
began the settlement of Detroit. This settlement marks the 
real beginning of civil and political history within the present 
limits of Michigan. 

Li due time the French began to establish themselves on 
the Northern frontier of the British colonies. They built 
Fort Niagara in 1726, four years after the English built Fort 
Oswego. Following the early footsteps of Champlain, they 
ascended to the head of the lake that bears his name, where 
they fortified Crown Point in 1727, and Ticonderoga in 1731. 
Presque Isle, the present site of the city of Erie, was occupied 
about the time that Vincennes was founded in the Wabash 
Valley. Finally, just on the eve of the last struggle between 
England and France, the French pressed into the valleys of 
the Alleghany and the Ohio, at the same time that the Eng- 
lish also began to enter them. 

Writers like Monette, with a strong French bias, speak 
admiringly of the growth of the French settlements in the 
West.' This was more rapid than the early growth of the 
Canadian settlements, but very slow as measured by the Eng- 
lish colonies, not to speak of the Western settlements of the 
United States. 

Li 17 1 2 old Kaskaskia was the capital of Illinois. In 1721 

' History of the Mississippi Valley, Book II., Chaps. Ill,, IV. 



48 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

it was the seat of a college and a monastery. Fort Chartres, 
founded in 1720, was the later capital, and one of the most 
formidable fortresses on the continent. A report of the pop- 
ulation of the Mississippi settlements in 1766 assigns sixty- 
five permanent families to Kaskaskia, forty-five to Cahokia, 
sixteen to St. Philip, twelve to Prairie du Rocher, and forty to 
Fort Chartres. These villages, with the outlying farms, prob- 
ably represented a population of twenty-five hundred souls. 
But this was after the English domination began, and the de- 
cline may have already begun. Monette claims a population 
of two or three thousand for Kaskaskia when it was at its 
best estate. He also asserts that, in 1730, the settlements on 
the Illinois embraced one hundred and forty families, besides 
about six hundred converted Indians, many traders, voyagcicrs, 
and coiirc2irs dcs bois. In 1765 Croghan, the Indian agent, 
found about one hundred families at Vincennes and Ouia- 
tenon, and no doubt there were others scattered along the 
river that he did not see. The same year Rogers, the 
redoubtable partisan soldier, found eighty or one hundred 
families, and about six hundred souls, within the stockade at 
Detroit, and about twenty-five hundred in the settlement, 
which extended up and down. the river, on both sides, some 
eight miles. Judge Walker estimates the total white popula- 
tion between the lakes and the two rivers at ten thousand, at 
the close of the war that transferred the sovereignty to Eng- 
land, and the estimate would seem a liberal one.' 

Surely this is a poor showing for three quarters of a cen- 
tury of growth in the garden of the West. But we must re- 
member the ideas upon which New France was builded. 
The trader was opposed to settlements because they meant 
the destruction of his trade. The Jesuit was opposed to them 
because they meant the destruction of his mission-field. The 
voyageiir and the coiireiir dcs bois were opposed to them be- 



' The Northwest during the Revolution, in Michigan Pioneer Collections, 
III., 12 et seq. 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 49 

cause they meant the destruction of their favorite modes of 
life. Only the soldier was left, and his business was not col- 
onization. Then the French people, dearly attached to their 
native country, have no real genius for colonies. In the 
seventeenth century the French Protestants would have been 
only too glad to plant colonies in America that would have 
shed lustre upon the name of France; but the same spirit 
that made them desirous of removing to America made it 
impossible for them to do so. Great pains were taken to 
protect the colonies against dangerous ideas. The strength 
that comes from freedom and self-dependence was resolutely 
suppressed ; colonial initiative in business or politics was not 
permitted ; trade, and particularly the fur-trade, was kept in 
the hands of grinding monopolies ; there was no politics, no 
printing press, no independent intellectual or religious life ; the 
throne was the seat of power as well as the fountain of honor ; 
in a word, New France was protected to death. The Old 
Regime crushed the life out of Canada, but no Frenchmen in 
the world were more devoted to the Old Regime than the 
Canadians. The king expended great sums of money on the 
colony, but corruption in Quebec, if possible, was ranker than 
corruption in Paris. A colony without colonists is an im- 
possibility, but this the home government did not seem to 
understand. Some of the more far-seeing governors called 
for agriculturists and artisans, and notably Jonquiere, who 
wanted ten thousand peasants sent over to people the Ohio 
Valley; but these calls made little impression, and led to no 
change of policy. 

In 1765 Croghan reported the habitants of the Wabash as 
*' an idle, lazy people, a parcel of renegades from Canada," 
" much worse than the Indians," and those of the Detroit 
as " generally poor wretches, a lazy, idle people depending 
chiefly on the savages for subsistence," " whose manners and 
customs they have certainly adopted." Judge Walker sup- 
poses that these descriptions apply to the voyagcurs and 
courcurs dcs bois, who flocked into the settlements in great 
4 



50 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

numbers in periods of idleness, rather than to the active and 
substantial traders and farmers, " many of them respectable, 
and some of noble birth and connections." ' No doubt this is 
perfectly true, but it is also true that the French settlements 
produced these classes in great numbers. In fact, one reason 
why the Frenchman got on so happily with the Indians was 
that he readily became an Indian himself. This peculiar de- 
velopment of wilderness-life is pertinent to Dr. Ellis's preg- 
nant remark, that for eyery Indian converted to Christianity 
hundreds of white men have fallen to the level of barbarism^ 
Besides, Croghan visited the Wabash and the Detroit soon 
after the close of the war, when the population was no doubt 
much demoralized. 

The industries of the Western settlements were furs, 
peltries, and agriculture. Twenty thousand hides and skins 
are said to have been shipped from the Wabash in 1705. The 
towns on the Mississippi were peculiarly well situated to carry 
on the fur-trade, since they could reach the whole upper 
country to the very sources of the river. The settlers early 
began to cultivate the soil. Besides growing maize and the 
vegetables of the New World, they introduced the European 
grains, vegetables, and fruits. In 1746 the Wabash country 
shipped six hundred barrels of flour to New Orleans, be- 
sides large quantities of hides, peltry, tallow, and bees-wax. 
The Detroit Jiabitants also cultivated the soil, but that settle- 
ment drew large quantities of supplies from the Illinois. 
Describing the trade that sprung up between the Illinois 
country and Lower Louisiana, Monette says furs, peltries, 
grain,' flour, etc., were sent down the Mississippi to Mobile, 
and thence to the West Indies and to Europe ; " and in 
return, the luxuries and refinements of European capitals 
were carried to the banks of the Illinois and Kaskaskia 
Rivers." Chartres was " the centre of life and fashion in 
the West." " The Jesuit College at Kaskaskia continued to 

' Micliigan Tioneer Collections, III., 12 et seq. 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 5 1 

flourish until the irruption of hostilities with Great Britain." 
The same writer finds " six distinct settlements, with their 
respective villages," on the Mississippi in 1731, extending 
from Cahokia, five miles below the present site of St. Louis, 
to Kaskaskia on the river of that name, five miles above its 
mouth. 

While conceding such decided advantages to the French 
in their competition with the English that he expresses sur- 
prise that their grip of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi 
was ever loosened, Professor Shaler still holds that they had 
some disadvantages. Canada is covered with drift, which is 
commonly fitted for cultivation at great cost of labor, and is 
north of the corn and pumpkin belt. After describing the 
American method of tilling the corn and the pumpkin, by 
which two crops are produced on the same land in one year, 
while the girdled trees are still standing, Professor Shaler 
remarks : " It is hardly too much to say that, but for these 
American plants and the American method of tilling them, 
it would have been decidedly more difficult to have fixed 
the early colonies on this shore." ' The point is well taken as 
to Canada, but not as to the West, where the two plants were 
thoroughly native to the soil. 

The first Louisiana, in a geographical sense, is that of 
Franquelin's great map, 1684. On the Gulf it extends from 
Mobile to the mouth of the Rio Grande ; on the north, the 
line runs along the shore of Lake Erie, and then northwest 
by the sources of the streams flowing into Lake Michigan until 
lost in the far North. East and west, it takes in the drainage 
of the Mississippi, and the Gulf streams beyond as far as 
the Rio Grande.^ The first political Louisiana was the grant 
made to Anthony Crozat, in 17 12: "The River St. Louis, 
heretofore called the Mississippi, from the edge of the sea as 
far as the Illinois, together with the River of St. Philip, here- 

' The Physiography of North America : Introduction to Narrative and Criti- 
cal History of America, IV. 

"^ Parkman : La Salle, 289, note. 



52 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tofore called the Missouri, and of the St. Jerome, heretofore 
called the Ouabache, with all the countries, territories, lakes 
within land, and the rivers which fall directly or indirectly into 
that part of the river St. Louis."' Crozat's Louisiana was a 
separate colony, but not wholly independent of Canada. In 
1717 Illinois, with limits not very different from those of the 
present State, was made a separate government, but still de- 
pendent upon Louisiana. Still later the Wabash country was 
separated from Illinois. It is foreign to our own purpose to 
describe the machinery by which these governments were car- 
ried on. But they were personal governments — governments 
of officers not of laws. The governor and the intendant com- 
monly quarrelled, as the king no doubt expected and desired 
them to do. What constant pains were taken to smother the 
very germs of political life, is well shown by a letter that 
Colbert wrote to Frontenac in 1672. 

" It is well for you to observe that you are always to follow 
in the government of Canada tlie forms in use here ; and since 
our kings have long regarded it as good for their service hot 
to convoke the states of the kingdom, in order, perhaps, to 
abolish insensibly this ancient usage, you on your part should 
very rarely, or, to speak more correctly, never give a corporate 
form to the inhabitants of Canada. You should even, as the 
colony strengthens, suppress gradually the office of the syndic 
who presents petitions in the name of the inhabitants ; for it is 
well that each should speak for himself and none for all." * 

Such a letter as this prepares us for the fact that " on 
politics and the affairs of the nation, they [the Illinois inhabi- 
tants] never suffered their minds to feel a moment's anxiety, 
believing implicitly that France ruled the world and all must 
be right." Major Stoddard, writing about the year 1804, says 
that the people of Louisiana "did not relish at first the change 
in the administration of justice when they came under the juris- 

' Narrative and Critical History, V., 28. - Cooley : Michigan, 9, 10. 



THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST. 53 

diction of the United States. The delays and the uncertainty 
attendant on trial by jury, and the multifarious technicali- 
ties of our jurisprudence, they could not well comprehend, 
either as to its import or its utility, and it is not strange 
that they should have preferred the more prompt and less ex- 
pensive decisions of the Spanish tribunals." ' 

The French colonists were utterly indii^erent to what Ameri- 
cans call political rights. They could no more comprehend 
the men trained in the English colonial school than such men 
could comprehend them. What fervent appeals the Conti- 
nental Congress made to the Canadians to join in the war 
against Great Britain ! What sacrifices the States made to 
break the British power in Canada ! And what a very meagre 
response was made to the appeals and sacrifices alike ! Some 
of the Canadians cast in their lot with the States : the West- 
ern habitants were generally friendly to the patriot cause, but 
this was owing to their hostility to England rather than to 
any conception that they had of what was involved in the 
contest. There is, perhaps, no better measure of the provin- 
cialism of the Revolutionary Fathers than their quiet assump- 
tion that the Canadians, steeped to the lips in ancicn regime, 
had political sentiments and aspirations like their own. Pos- 
sibly the national pride of a few Canadians was touched 
when the Congress of 1774, in the address to the people 
of Canada, invoked the shade of " the immortal Montes- 
quieu ; " but that was all. The incapacity of the Canadians 
to manage representative institutions and the jury system was 
urged as a reason for restoring the French system of laws, 
when the Quebec bill was before Parliament ; and it is impos- 
sible to deny force to the argument. In fact, the want of 
political ideas and habits, on the part of the habitants of Illi- 
nois, was a serious inconvenience when the time came to or- 
ganize society on an Anglo-Saxon basis. 

Finally, the cruel oppression of the monopolies, and the 

' Monette : History of the Valley of the Mississippi, L, 191, 194. 



54 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

restrictive policy of the government, had much to do with 
driving the young men of Canada from regular industry into 
the woods ; and the remoteness of the Illinois settlements 
from Quebec and New Orleans helps to explain their com- 
parative prosperity. 

Turgot was right when he compared colonies to fruit that 
falls to the ground when ripe, but colonies never ripen under 
such a regimen as this.-^ 

1 Mucli valuable information relating to the subjects of this chapter and 
the last one is found in the following work : The History of Illinois and Louisi- 
ana under the French Rule, Embracing a General View of the French Dominion 
in North America, with some Account of the English Occupation of Illinois. 
By Joseph Wallace, Cincinnati, 1893. 



V. 

ENGLAND WRESTS THE NORTHWEST FROM 

FRANCE : 

The First Treaty of Paris. 

This contest was the culmination of the long and bitter 
struggle of England and France for supremacy in the New 
World. I shall rapidly review the main facts leading up to 
this culmination, and then assign to the West its place in the 
controversy. 

Professor J. R. Seeley has attempted to show that " ex- 
pansion " is the key to English history in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries ; that the wars of England and France 
grew out of their colonial rivalries ; and that the explanation 
of the policies of the two powers must be sought in Asia, the 
Indies, and America.' There is a considerable measure of 
truth in the propositions that the English professor expounds 
with so much eloquence and learning; but there is an unmis- 
takable difference between the first four Anglo-French wars 
in America and the last one of the series. The very names 
that three of them bear indicate their origin and nature : they 
were wars of kings and queens. These wars began in Europe ; 
they grew out of Old World quarrels, and the treaties of 
peace that ended them were mainly concerned with Old 
World matters. The colonies fought because the mother 
countries fought. The fifth and last of these wars began in 
Am.erica ; it was waged here two years before it was declared 

' The Expansion of England. 



56 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

in Europe; it involved a distinct and most important Ameri- 
can question; and the terms of peace affected the welfare and 
destiny of America more than of any other part of the globe. 

In 1629, when the colonies of both powers were in their 
very infancy, David Kirk captured Quebec and sent the garri- 
son to Europe; but, on the conclusion of peace, the conquest 
was given up to France, and the life of the colony began 
again. 

King William's War, 1689-97, was but the extension to 
America of the great European contest growing out of the 
ascension of William and Mary to the throne of England. 
The most striking features of this war are the massacres of 
Schenectady and Salmon Falls, the seizure and plunder of Port 
Royal, and the two unsuccessful attempts to invade and reduce 
Canada, one made by way of Lake Champlain and the other 
by the Lower St. Lawrence. Peace came with the Treaty of 
Ryswick in 1697, each belligerent surrendering all countries, 
islands, forts, and colonies, wherever situated, that he had capt- 
ured, belonging to the other at the opening of hostilities. 

Queen Anne's War, 1702-13, was a prolongation of the 
one that preceded it. It is the American phase of the war 
of the Spanish succession. Again the English colonists cap- 
tured Port Royal, thenceforth called Annapolis, and again 
they vainly attempted, both by the Champlain and the St. 
Lawrence routes, the reduction of Canada. America is much 
more prominent in the Treaty of Utrecht than in the Treaty 
of Ryswick. Newfoundland and the adjacent islands, and 
Nova Scotia, or Acadia, " with its ancient boundaries," were 
ceded to the English Crown.> The treaty also restored to 
Great Britain the Mudson Bay region, which had fallen into 
French hands, and contained an agreement, " on both sides, to 
determine within a year, by commissaries to be chosen forth- 
with, named by each party, the limits which are to be fixed 
between the said Bay of Hudson and the places appertaining 
to France." Another stipulation of the treaty was the spring- 
ing point of bitter controversies that we shall have occasion to 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. 57 

touch upon hereafter. This was the admission, on the part 
of France, that " the five nations or cantons of Indians " were 
"subject to Great Britain." 

King George's War, 1744-48, is the American phase of 
the war of the Austrian succession. The single incident that 
need be mentioned is the capture, by the English colonists, 
aided by a British fleet, of Louisburg and the whole island of 
Cape Breton, an heroic exploit that was rendered abortive by 
the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which restored all conquests 
made in the war, on either side, to the original owners. For 
many years there had been angry disputes between the two 
powers concerning their American boundaries. In particular 
had there been a dispute as to the boundaries of Acadia, sur- 
rendered by France to England in 171 3, Flis Britannic Majesty 
claiming the vast region bounded by the Gulf and River St, 
Lawrence, the ocean, and New England, His most Christian 
Majesty denying that his royal brother was entitled, by the 
Treaty of Utrecht, to more than a part of the peninsula 
of Nova Scotia. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle left all these 
questions open, and provided for a commission empowered to 
settle them. This commission was appointed, but it never 
accomplished more in its three years' discussions than to ac- 
cumulate some volumes of arguments that convinced nobody. 
The fact is, the question at issue had got beyond the power of 
diplomatists in the year 1748. All they could do was to leave 
it for soldiers to settle. 

Matters were left in such condition, both in Europe and 
America, by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, that the peace 
could not last long on either continent. We are not concerned 
with the situation on the other side of the ocean, but on this 
side we must give it a rapid survey. 

The close of King George's War was marked by an ex- 
traordinary development of interest in the Western country. 
The Pennsylvanians and Virginians had worked their way 
well up to the eastern foot-hills of the last range of mountains 
separating them from the interior. Even the Connecticut 



58 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

men were ready to overleap the province of New York and 
take possession of the Susquehanna. The time for the 
English colonists to attempt the Great Mountains in force 
had been long in coming, but it had plainly arrived. 

In 1748 the Ingles-Draper settlement, the first regular 
settlement of English-speaking men on the Western waters, 
was made at " Draper's Meadow," on the New River, a 
branch of the Kanawha. The same year Dr. Thomas Walker, 
accompanied by a number of Virginia gentlemen and a party 
of hunters, made their way by Southwestern Virginia into 
Kentucky and Tennessee. The names of Cumberland River, 
Cumberland Mountains, Cumberland Gap, and Louisa River 
are mementos of this excursion. The Cumberlands all take 
their name from the Duke of Cumberland, the hero of CuUo- 
den, celebrated in Campbell's line — 

" Proud Cumberland prances, insulting the slain," 

and the Louisa River was named for the royal duke's wife. 

The same year the Ohio company, consisting of thirteen 
prominent Virginians and Marylanders, and one London mer- 
chant, was formed. Its avowed objects were to speculate in 
Western lands, and to carry on trade on an extensive scale 
with the Indians. It does not appear to have contemplated 
the settlement of a new colony. The company obtained 
from the crown a conditional grant of five hundred thousand 
acres of land in the Ohio Valley, to be located mainly be- 
tween the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers, and it ordered 
large shipments of goods for the Indian trade from London. 
These goods were to be carried to the Upper Potomac, and 
then, by a road that the company proposed to build for trans- 
portation and travel, to the waters of the Ohio. In 1750 the 
company sent Christopher Gist, a veteran woodsman and 
trader living on the Yadkin, down the northern side of the 
Ohio, with instructions, as Mr. Bancroft summarizes them, 
" to examine the Western country as far as the Falls of the 
Ohio ; to look for a large tract of good level land ; to mark 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. 59 

the passes in the mountains ; to trace the courses of the 
rivers ; to count the falls ; to observe the strength of the 
Indian nations." ' Under these instructions, Gist made the 
first English exploration of Southern Ohio of which we have 
any report. The next year he made a similar exploration of 
the country south of the Ohio, as far as the Great Kanawha. 
The determination of the company is shown by its declara- 
tion that it would go to the Mississippi, if necessary, in order 
to find good lands. Gist's reports of his explorations added to 
the growing interest in the over-mountain country. At that 
time the Ohio Valley was waste and unoccupied, save by the 
savages, but adventurous traders, mostly Scotch-Irish, and 
commonly men of reckless character and loose morals, made 
trading excursions as far as the River Miami. The Indian 
town of Pickawillany, on the upper w^aters of that stream, 
became a great centre of English trade and influence. 

Another evidence of the growing interest in the West is 
the fact that the colonial authorities, in every direction, were 
seeking to obtain Indian titles to the Western lands, and to 
bind the Indians to the English by treaties. The Iroquois 
had long claimed, by right of conquest, the country from the 
Cumberland Mountains to the Lower Lakes and the Missis- 
sippi, and for many years the authorities of New York had 
been steadily seeking to gain a firm treaty-hold of that coun- 
try. In 1684, the Iroquois, at Albany, placed themselves 
under the protection of King Charles and the Duke of York ; 
in 1726, they conveyed all their lands in trust to England, to 
be protected and defended by his Majesty to and for the use 
of the grantors and their heirs, which was an acknowledg- 
ment by the Indians of what the French had acknowledged 
thirteen years before at Utrecht. In 1744, the very year that 
King George's War began, the deputies of the Iroquois, at 
Lancaster, Pa., confirmed to Maryland the lands within that 
province, and made to Virginia a deed that covered the whole 

' History, ii., 362, 363. 



60 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

West as effectually as the Virginian interpretation of the 
charter of 1609, soon to be noticed. This treaty is of the 
greatest importance in subsequent history ; it is the starting- 
point of later negotiations with the Indians concerning West- 
ern lands. It gave the English their first real treaty-hold 
upon the West ; and it stands in all the statements of the 
English claim to the Western country, side by side with 
the Cabot voyages. Again at Albany, in 1748, the bonds 
binding the Six Nations and the English together were 
strengthened, and at the same time the Miamis were brought 
within the covenant chain. In 1750-54 negotiators were 
busy with attempts to draw to the English interest the West- 
ern tribes. Council fires burned at Logstown, at Shawnee- 
town, and at Pickawillany, and generally with results favor- 
able to the English. 

There was, indeed, no small amount of dissension among 
the colonies, and it must not be supposed that they were all 
working together to effect a common purpose. ■ The royal 
governors could not agree. There were bitter dissensions be- 
tween governors and assemblies. Colony was jealous of col- 
ony. Mercenary traders appealed to the fears of the Indians, 
telling them, what was true enough, that the English wanted 
their lands. Every argument pointed to the necessity of for- 
tifying the Forks of the Ohio ; but the dispute as to jurisdic- 
tion between Virginia and Pennsylvania which broke out in 
1752 not only left the increasing population to its own nat- 
ural turbulence, because neither colony ventured to appoint 
magistrates, but made both wary of spending money that 
might prove to be for the greater advantage of the other. It 
is to be feared that English interests in the West would have 
been wrecked at last had they been abandoned wholly to 
governors and assemblies. There were men among them of 
statesman-like forecast, but these could not give direction to 
affairs. Fortunately, the cause of England and the colonies 
was not abandoned to politicians. The time had come for 
the Anglo-Saxon column, that had been so long in reaching 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. 6l 

them, to pass the Endless Mountains ; and the logic of events 
swept everything into the Westward current. 

In the years following the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle the 
French were not idle. Galissoniere, the governor of Canada, 
thoroughly comprehended what was at stake. In 1749 he 
sent Celoron de Bienville into the Ohio Valley, with a suit- 
able escort of whites and savages, to take formal possession of 
the valley in the name of the King of France, to propitiate 
the Indians, and in all ways short of actual warfare to thwart 
the English plans. Bienville crossed the portage from Lake 
Erie to Lake Chautauqua, the easternmost of the portages 
from the Lakes to the Southern streams ever used by the 
French, and made his way by the Alleghany River and the 
Ohio as far as the Miami, and returned by the Maumee and 
Lake Erie to Montreal. His report to the governor was any- 
thing but reassuring. He found the English traders swarm- 
ing in the valley, and the Indians generally well disposed to 
the English. Nor did French interests improve the two or 
three succeeding years. 

The Marquis Duquesne, who succeeded Galissoniere, soon 
discovered the drift of events. He saw the necessity of action ; 
he was clothed with power to act, and he was a man of action. 
And so, early in the year 1753, while the English governors 
and assemblies were still hesitating and disputing, he sent a 
strong force by Lake Ontario and Niagara to seize and hold 
the northeastern branches of the Ohio. This was a master- 
stroke : unless recalled, it would lead to war ; and Duquesne 
was not the man to recall it. This force, passing over the 
portage between Presque Isle and French Creek, constructed 
Forts Le Boeuf and Venango, the second at the confluence of 
French Creek and the Alleghany River. 

George Washington now makes his first historical appear- 
ance. He comes with a commission from Lieutenant-Governor 
Dinwiddle, of Virginia, to inquire of the ofificer commanding 
the French force by whose authority and instructions he has 
invaded the territories of the King of Great Britain, and to 



62 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

demand his peaceable departure. He returns to Williams- 
burg with the answer that the French commander will refer 
the matter to the governor, at Quebec, and that in the mean- 
time he shall continue to hold his ground. It was now winter, 
and nothing more could be done that season, but early the 
next year a small force of Virginians was sent to seize and 
fortify the Forks of the Ohio. Before the works that should 
have been built two or three years before could be completed, 
or the men building them could be reinforced, the French de- 
scended the Alleghany in stronger numbers and captured both 
fort and garrison. They demolished the English fortification, 
and built a much stronger one, that they called Fort Duquesne. 
As usual, they had been too prompt for their rivals. They 
had seized the door to the West. This was an unmistakable 
act of war, and it precipitated at once the inevitable contest. 

" Inevitable contest ! " The words sound like a decree of 
fate. But when two hostile armies, moving on converging 
roads, reach the point of convergence, a battle follows. The 
French column, with the St. Lawrence as a base, has been 
long moving in the direction of the Ohio ; the English col- 
umn, with the seaboard as a base, has also been moving tow- 
ard the same destination ; they enter the valley at practi- 
cally the same time, the French asserting their right to the 
country on the ground of discovery and occupation, the Eng- 
lish asserting their right by virtue of the Cabot voyages, the 
Iroquois protectorate, and the Indian purchases. Given the 
character of Englishmen and Frenchmen — given the geograph- 
ical relations of the Atlantic Plain to the St. Lawrence-Lake 
Basin, and the relations of both these to the Mississippi Val- 
ley, a contest for the West was inevitable from the time that 
the foundations of Jamestown and Quebec were laid down, 
unless, indeed, one of the two powers should overwhelm the 
other at an earlier day. 

" French America had two heads — one among the snows of 
Canada, and one among the cane-brakes of Louisiana ; one 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. 63 

communicating with tiie world through the Gulf of St. Law- 
rence, and the other through the Gulf of Mexico. These vital 
points were feebly connected by a chain of military posts — 
slender and often interrupted — circling through the wilderness 
nearly three thousand miles. Midway between Canada and 
Louisiana lay the Valley of the Ohio. If the English should 
seize it, they would sever the chain of posts and cut French 
America asunder. If the French held it, and intrenched them- 
selves well along its eastern limits, they would shut their rivals 
between the Alleghanies and the sea, control all the tribes of 
the West, and turn them, in case of war, against the English 
borders — a frightful and insupportable scourge."' 

Braddock's army was the wedge intended to split French 
America asunder, but it was shattered to pieces at the battle 
of the Monongahela. 

The shifting scenes of the French and Indian war will not 
here be painted even in outline. But it is essential to bring 
out in bold relief several of its larger features. 

Mr. Bancroft says the question at the opening of the strug- 
gle was, which of the two languages should be the mother 
tongue of the future millions of the West — whether the Ro- 
manic or the Teutonic race should form the seed of its people. 
But the question soon became wider than the West. From 
the moment that William Pitt became, in 1757, the genius of 
the English Cabinet, England contemplated nothing less than 
the reduction of all Canada. Pitt's policy was to crush the 
French colonial empire in both worlds, and he distinctively 
grasped the American issue. Mr. John Richard Green says of 
Pitt : " He felt that the stake he was playing for was some- 
thing vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Eu- 
rope. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye 
was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St. Law- 
rence. " Pitt himself said in the House of Commons: " If I 



Paikman : Montcalm and Wolfe, i., 39-40. 



64 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

send an army to Germany, it is because in Germany I can 
conquer America." ' 

From the moment that the war became one of conquest it 
was more than ever a war of geography. The French strong- 
holds were Louisburg in Cape Breton, Quebec and Montreal 
on the St. Lawrence, Ticonderoga at the head of Lake Cham- 
plain, Fort Frontenac at the foot of Lake Ontario, Fort Niag- 
ara on the river of that name, Detroit, which held the connec- 
tion between the Lower and Upper Lakes, and Fort Duquesne, 
at the Forks of the Ohio. Niagara and Duquesne were the 
two keys to the West, Duquesne's military relation to the 
Ohio Valley was more important then than its commercial re- 
lation, is now. To Canada there were three lines of approach : 
one by Lake Ontario, one by Lake Champlain and the Riche- 
lieu, and one by the Lower St, Lawrence. The almost insur- 
mountable obstacles offered by every one of these were over- 
come, and in 1760 the conquest of Canada was effected by 
three armies that converged at Montreal from the three direc- 
tions, on the same day. However, when the war became one of 
invasion and conquest the advantages of the two parties were 
reversed — the French moved on the exterior and longer, and 
the English on the interior and shorter, line. 

" ' Geography,' says Von Moltke, ' is three-fourths of mili- 
tarytscience ;' and never was the truth of his words more fully 
exemplified. Canada was fortified with vast outworks of de- 
fence in the savage forests, marshes, and mountains that en- 
compassed her, where the thoroughfares were streams choked 
with fallen trees and obstructed by cataracts. Never was 
the problem of moving troops encumbered with baggage and 
artillery a more difficult one. The question was less how to 
fight the enemy than how to get at him. If a few practicable 
roads had crossed the broad tract of wilderness the war would 
have been shortened and its character changed." " 

'History of the English People, iv., 195. 
^Parkman : Montcalm and Wolfe, ii., 380. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. 65 

At the outset both of the powers had much to say of 
boundaries and rights. The French claimed, by right of dis- 
covery and occupation, all lands draining to the St. Lawrence, 
the Lakes, and the Mississippi, a plain geographical principle 
of demarcation that would have given them much of New 
York and Pennsylvania, as well as all the West, and have 
confined the English to the Atlantic Plain. It is true that 
French occupation, while perhaps fulfilling the demands of in- 
ternational law, did not answer the purposes of civilization ; 
but when we contrast the heroic ardor of the French voya- 
gcurs, soldiers, and priests who opened up the Great West to 
the vision of men with the apathy of the English colonists, 
although our judgment approve the final issue, we can but 
agree with Mr. Parkman when he says France's " pretensions 
were moderate and reasonable compared with those of Eng- 
land." ' England having nothing to show in the fields of 
Western discovery and exploration, rested on the Cabot 
voyages and the Iroquois title. The Cabot title was never 
allowed in the Court of Nations, and was abandoned in 1763 
by England herself, while the acknowledgment of 1713 that 
the dominion of the Iroquois was in the English Government 
gave but the flimsiest claim to the lands south of the Lakes. 

"The Treaty of Utrecht declared the Iroquois, or Five 
Nations, to be British subjects ; therefore it was insisted that 
all countries conquered by them belonged to the British 
Crown. But what was an Iroquois conquest? Tlie Iroquois 
rarely occupied the countries they overran. Their military 
expeditions were mere raids, great or small. Sometimes, as in 
the case of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it 
peace ; again, as in the case of the Illinois, they drove off the 
occupants of the soil, who returned after the invaders were 
gone. But the range of their war-parties was prodigious, and 
the English laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie 
where an Iroquois had taken a scalp." "^ 

' Montcalm and Wolfe, i., 124, 125. 

2 Parkman : Montcalm and Wolfe, i., 125. 



66 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

This point is noted with particularity because important 
political issues turned upon it at a later day. 

But the discussion of " rights" was little better than boys* 
play then, as it is now. The contest was one of force, and 
the weight of the English sword decided the issue. 

Two years after the first skirmishing in the backwoods of 
Pennsylvania, there broke out in Europe the Seven Years' 
War, which swept all the great powers into its vortex, which 
extended to every continent and reached every sea. In 
Macaulay's sweeping phrase, " Black men fought on the coast 
of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great 
Lakes of North America." It was the first and only European 
war that began on this side of the Ocean. Its close saw France 
discomfited and humiliated in both worlds. She had lost 
greater dominions than, perhaps, ever changed hands at the 
close of any other war in history. But there is no more 
glorious moment in the history of England. It was the time 
when every Englishman could feel, with just pride — 

" That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue, 
And Wolfe's great heart compatriot with his own." ^ 

On this continent, the long conflict culminated September 
13, 1759, when the armies of Montcalm and Wolfe stood face 
to face on the Heights of Abraham. The next year saw the 
capitulation of Canada. When the time came to treat for a 
general peace in 1763, the King of France bowed to the fort- 
unes of war in the manner following : 

" His most Christian Majesty renounces all pretensions which 
he has heretofore formed, or might form, to Nova Scotia, or 
Acadia, in all its parts, and guarantees the whole of it, and with 
all its dependencies, to the K^ing of Great Britain ; moreover, 
his most Christian Majesty cedes and guarantees to his said 
Britannic Majesty, in full right, Canada, with all its depend- 
encies, as well as the island of Cape Breton, and all other 
islands and coasts in the Gulf and River St, Lawrence, and, in 

' Seeley : The Expansion of England, 22. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. ^7 

general, everything tlmt depends on the said countries, lands, 
islands, and coasts, with the sovereignty, property, possession^ 
and all rights acquired by treaty or otherwise, which the most 
Christian King, and the Crown of France, have had till now 
over the said countries, islands, lands, places, coasts, and their 
inhabitants, so that the most Christian King cedes and makes 
over the whole to the said king, and to the Crown of Great 
Britain, and that in the most ample manner and form, without 
restriction, and without any liberty to depart from the said ces- 
sion and guarantee, under any pretence, or to disturb Great 
Britain in the possessions above-mentioned. 

"In order to re-establish peace on solid and durable founda- 
tions, and to remove forever all subject of dispute with regard 
to the limits of the British and French territories on the conti- 
nent of America, it is agreed that for the future the confines 
between the dominions of his Britannic Majesty and those of 
his most Christian Majesty in that part of the world shall be 
fixed irrevocably by a line drawn along the middle of the 
River Mississippi from its source to the River Iberville, and 
from thence by a line drawn along the middle of this river 
and the Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to the sea ; and 
for this purpose the most Christian King cedes in full right, 
and guarantees to his Britannic Majesty, the river and port of 
the Mobile, and everything which he possesses, or ought to 
possess, on the left side of the River Mississippi, except the 
town of New Orleans and the island on which it is situated, 
which shall remain to France, provided that the navigation of 
the River Mississippi shall be equally free, as well to the sub- 
jects of Great Britain as to those of France, in its whole 
breadth and length, from its source to the sea ; and expressly 
that part which is between the said island of New Orleans and 
tlie right bank of that river, as well as the passage both in and 
out of its mouth." ' 

These arc some of the provisions of that treaty, which 
always caused Count De Vergennes to shudder whenever he 

' Chalmers : A Collection of Treaties, i., 471, 473. 



68 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

thought of it, and that called out explosions of volcanic 
wrath from the first Napoleon. 

Other territorial changes deeply affecting the course of 
history were made at the close of the Seven Years' War. Spain 
had taken part in the contest as an ally of France. England 
had captured Havana, in the island of Cuba, the very key to the 
Gulf of Mexico. To regain that, Spain surrendered Florida to 
England, and then received as a compensation from France all of 
her possessions on the continent of North America that did 
not pass to England. The grand result of these changes was 
that England and Spain now divided North America, the Miss- 
issippi River being the only definite boundary between them. 

We must not allow our admiration of what the French had 
done in the West to blind us to the fact that the British cause 
was the cause of the Northwest and of America. Put in the 
broadest way, the question was, whether French or English 
ideas and tendencies should have sway in North America. 
Montcalm and Wolfe were both gallant soldiers and able com- 
manders ; both true patriots and chivalrous gentlemen ; but 
they stood on the Heights of Abraham that September day for 
very different things : Montcalm for the old rcgi)]u\ Wolfe for 
the House of Commons; Montcalm for the alliance of king 
and priest, Wolfe for habeas corpus and free inquiry ; Montcalm 
for the past, Wolfe for the future ; Montcalm for Louis XV. and 
Madame de Pompadour, Wolfe for George Washington and 
Abraham Lincoln. It was his clear perception of this point that 
led Mr. John Fiske to say : " The triumph of Wolfe marks the 
greatest turning-point as yet discoverable in modern history." ' 

That the war was a war of civilizations becomes per- 
fectly clear when we consider the temper, culture, and aims 
of the two classes of colonists. The history of French Amer- 
ica is far more picturesque and brilliant than the history of 
British America in the period 1608-1754. But the English 
were doing work far more solid, valuable, and permanent than 



' American Political Ideas, 56. 





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THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM FRANCE. 69 

their northern neighbors. The French took to the lakes, rivers, 
and forests ; they cultivated the Indians ; their explorers were 
intent on discovery, their traders on furs, their missionaries on 
souls. The English did not either take to the woods or culti- 
vate the Indians ; they loved agriculture and trade. State and 
Church, and so clung to their fields, shops, politics, and 
churches. As a result, while Canada languished, thirteen 
English states grew up on the Atlantic Plain modelled on 
the Saxon pattern, and became populous, rich, and strong. 
At the beginning of the war there were eighty thousand 
white inhabitants in New France, one million one hundred 
and sixty thousand in the British colonies. The disparity 
of wealth was equally striking. In 1754 there was more 
real civilization — more seeds of things — in the town of Bos- 
ton than in all New France. In time, these compact and 
vigorous British colonies offered effective resistance to Great 
Britain. It is plain that, had they spread themselves out 
over half a continent, hunted beaver, and trafficked with the 
Indians, after the manner of the French, Independence would 
have been postponed many years, and possibly forever. We 
owe a vast debt to the inherited character of those English- 
men who came to America in the first half of the seventeenth 
century, and no small debt to the Appalachian mountain-wall 
that confined them to the narrow Atlantic Slope until, by 
reason of compression and growth, they were gotten ready, 
first to enter the West in force, and then to extort their inde- 
pendence from England. 

But the French and Indian War borrows its great signifi- 
cance from another struggle. It was but the prelude to a 
grander contest. " With the triumph of Wolfe on the 
Heights of Abraham," writes Mr. Green, " began the history 
of the United States." ' James Wolfe's Highlanders and 
grenadiers at Quebec, and not the embattled farmers at Lex- 
ington, won the first victory of the American Revolution. 

' History of the English People, iv,, 193, 194. 



VI. 

THE THIRTEEN COLONIES AS CONSTITUTED 
BY THE ROYAL CHARTERS.— (I.) 

To encourage American plantations, the British Crown 
granted from time to time those charters that constitute the 
first chapter of American Jurisprudence. In bounding the 
grants of land that those charters conveyed, the Crown was 
governed neither by a knowledge of American geography nor 
by a legal principle. The most imaginative man alive could 
not bound his estates in Spain with greater disregard of Span- 
ish geography and Spanish law. The grants overlapped and 
conflicted with one another in a way that was then most 
troublesome to- colonists and proprietors, and that is now 
most exasperating to students of history. Five causes will 
explain these conflictions : (i) Gross ignorance of American 
geography ; (2) the great size of the early grants ; (3) the 
surrender or vacation of charters ; (4) the influence of favor- 
ites praying for grants to themselves or their friends ; (5) the 
royal.prerogative. I shall transcribe the boundary descriptions 
found in the principal charters, and show how the Thirteen 
Colonies took shape under them.' 

The charter given to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 granted 



' The texts found in Poore's Charters and Constitutions of the United 
States will be followed. In preparing this chapter and the next one the 
author has received great assistance from " Bulletin of the United States Geologi- 
cal Survey, No. 13 : Boundaries of the United States and of the Several States 
and Territories, with an Historical Sketch of the Territorial Changes, " by Henry 
Gannett, Chief Geographer. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. /I 

to that " trusty and well-beloved servant " of Queen Eliza- 
beth, his heirs and assigns forever — 

" free libertie and licence from time to time, and at all times for- 
euer Jiereafter, to discouer, search, finde out, and view such re- 
mote heathen and barbarous lands, counteries, and territories, 
not actually possessed of any Christian Prince nor inhabited by 
Christian People, as to him, his heires and assignes, and to euery 
or any of them, sliall seeme good, and the same to haue, holde, 
occupie, and enjoy to him, his heires and assignes, foreuer, with 
all prerogatiues, commodities, jurisdictions, royalties, priuileges, 
franchises, and preheminences, thereto or thereabouts both by 
sea and land, whatsoeuer we by our letters patents may graunt, 
and as we or any of our noble progenitors haue heretofore 
grauntcd to any person or persons, bodies politique or corpo- 
rate." 

The charter further forbade any person or persons whatso- 
ever inhabiting or attempting to inhabit the same countries 
coming Avithin two hundred leagues of the place or places 
where Raleigh, his heirs and assigns, or his or their associates 
in any company, should, within six years ensuing, make their 
dwellings or abidings, without his or their consent ; and it 
authorized and instructed him or them to encounter and ex- 
pulse, to repel and resist, as well by sea as by land, all who 
should attempt to do so. Raleigh's unsuccessful attempts to 
plant under this charter are among the chivalrous and pathetic 
stories of early American adventure. 

While it was well understood that Raleigh was to plant in 
the Queen's American possessions, the name America does 
not occur in the document. He was not to go into lands 
actually possessed by any Christian prince nor inhabited by 
Christian people, but that was the only limitation. It is plain 
that her dominions on this continent lay before Elizabeth's 
eyes an undifferentiated mass without assigned metes and 
bounds, and that other grants or colonies were not then 
contemplated. As those dominions then had no distinctive 



72 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

name, Raleigh proposed Virginia, and Elizabeth, who was 
fond of being called " the Virgin Queen," approved the sug- 
gestion. 

In 1606 James I. "vouchsafed" to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir 
George Somers, and divers others of his loving subjects- who 
had been suitors unto him — 

" Licence to make Habitation, Plantation, and to deduce a 
colony of sundry of our People into that part of America com- 
monly called Virginia, and other parts and Territories in Amer- 
ica, either appertaining unto us, or which are not now actually 
possessed by any Christian Prince or People, situate, lying, and 
being all along the Sea-Coasts between four-and-thirty degrees 
of Northerly latitude from the Equinoctial Line and five-and- 
forty Degrees of the same Latitude, and in the main Land be- 
tween the same four-and-thirty and five-and-forty Degrees, and 
the Islands thereunto adjacent, or within one hundred Miles of 
the Coast thereof." 

The charter then provided for two companies, the first 
called the London Company and the second the Plymouth 
Company. The London Company should make their first 
plantation at any place upon the said coast of Virginia or 
America where they should think fit and convenient, between 
the said four-and-thirty and one-and-forty degrees of the said 
latitude, and the Plymouth Company should begin their 
plantation at any place on the said coast of Virginia and 
America where they should think fit and convenient, be- 
tween eight-and-thirty degrees and five-and-forty degrees 
of the same latitude. Each colony should have all lands, 
soils, etc., from its first seat of plantation, by the space of fifty 
English statute miles, all along the coast toward the west and 
southwest as the coast lies ; also all the lands, etc., along the 
coast to the north, northeast, or east for the space of fifty 
miles; all the islands within one hundred miles directly over 
and against the sea-coast, and also all the lands from the same 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. Tl 

fifty miles every way on the sea-coast, directly into the main- 
land one hundred miles. The charter further provided that 
no other of the king's subjects should be permitted to plant 
or inhabit behind them toward the mainland without the ex- 
press license or consent of the council of the colony affected 
or interested first obtained in writing. It will be seen that 
the two zones within which the two companies might plant 
their colonies overlapped three degrees of latitude. Colli- 
sions were, however, guarded against by a provision that 
neither company should make a settlement within one hun- 
dred miles of one already made by the other. 

The charter of 1606 marks a decided step toward geo- 
graphical precision and definiteness. The settlements are to 
be made on the coasts of Virginia and America, within parallels 
34° and 45° north latitude, which lines, falling as far apart as 
the mouth of the Cape Fear River and the mouth of the St. 
Croix, comprehended the larger part of King James's American 
possessions. Two colonies were provided for. Evidently 
that process of evolution had begun which led to the North- 
ern and Southern groups of colonies. 

The settlement at Jamestown was made under this char- 
ter. But as it did not prove satisfactory, the king, in 1609, 
granted the London Company a second charter, in which he 
bounded the colony that henceforth monopolized the name 
Virginia as follows: 



"... Situate, lying, and being in that Part of America 
called Virginia, from the Point of Land called Cape or Point 
Comfort, all along the Sea-Coast to the Northward two hundred 
miles, and from the said Point of Cape Comfort "aW along the Sea- 
Coast to the Southward two hundred Miles, and all that Space 
and Circuit of Land lying from the Sea-Coast of the Precinct 
aforesaid up into the Land throughout from Sea to Sea, West 
and Northwest And also all the Islands lying within one hun- 
dred Miles along the Coast of both Seas of the Precinct afore- 
said. ..." 



74 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

This was the first of the "from sea to sea" boundaries 
that play so important a part in history. The description 
"up into the land throughout from sea to sea, west and 
northwest," led to important results, the least of which is 
the interminable discussion of what it meant. It has been 
suggested that it meant a compound boundary line run- 
ning from the Atlantic Ocean around to the Atlantic Ocean 
again ; but the islands within one hundred miles along the 
coast of "both seas" are given to Virginia, and this fact is 
fatal to such a construction. Historians commonly assume 
that the northern and southern lines of the colony were in- 
tended to be due east and west lines, and much can be said 
in support of this view. The lines drawn by the charter of 
1606 were east and west lines. The royal intent in 1606-09 
and 1620 was two colonies ; Virginia and New England 
were evidently to embrace all the king's possessions from lati- 
tude 34° north to the French territories. The ocean front 
now given to Virginia carries the colony to the fortieth de- 
gree. And, finally, the charter of 1620 bounded New Eng- 
land on the south by that parallel. But the king's language 
describes one west and one northwest line. If this view 
be assumed, the description is still open to two constructions 
that assign to Virginia very different limits. If the construc- 
tion represented in the following diagram be taken, the 
colony would be a triangle of very moderate size. 



Northern Point. 




But if the following be the true construction, the colony 
would be a vast trapezoid, six degrees of latitude in width on 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 



75 



the Atlantic Ocean, and from twenty to thirty degrees on the 
Pacific. 




Northern Point. 



Point Comfort. 



Southern Point. 



If the theoiy of one west and one northwest line be 
adopted, only the second of these constructions will fill the 
condition " from sea to sea." As this was the construction 
adopted by Virginia, and as it materially influenced Western 
history, I shall assume that such is the meaning of the lan- 
guage. 

The Plymouth Company was overshadowed by its richer 
and stronger rival. Only one attempt at colonization was 
made by its authority under the charter of 1606, and that 
ended in failure. But a new charter was obtained in 1620, 
under which the company became more active. This was 
the second of the two charters into which that of 1606 was 
merged. It absolutely gave, granted, and confirmed unto the 
council established at Plymouth, in the County of Devon, Eng- 
land, for the planting, ruling, and governing of the northern 
parts of Virginia in America, a territory that is thus bounded : 

" That aforesaid Part of America lying and being in Breadth 
from fforty Degrees of Northerly Latitude from the Equinoctiall 
Line to fforty-eight Degrees of the said Northerly Latitude inclu- 
sively, and in Length of, and within all the Breadtli aforesaid, 
throughout all the Maine Lands from Sea to Sea . . . and 
also within the said Islands and Seas adjoining, Provided always, 



^6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

that the said Islands, or any of the Premises hereinbefore men- 
tioned, and by these Presents intended and meant to be granted, 
be not actually possessed or inhabited by any other Christian 
Prince or Estate, nor to be within the Bounds, Limitts, or Terri- 
toryes of that Southern Collony heretofore by us granted to be 
planted by divers of our loving Subjects in the South Part, etc." 

The king also declared it to be his will and pleasure, to 
the end that the said territory should be more certainly 
known and distinguished, that the same should henceforth be 
called by the name of New England in America. This grant 
covered eight degrees of latitude. Fully one-half of the terri- 
tory that it embraced on the coast was at the time claimed 
by the French ; in fact, the whole of it was covered by the 
Acadia charter of 1603, and much of it remained in French 
hands until they retired from the continent in 1763. 

Why James I. bounded the grants of 1609 and 1620 on 
the west by the South Sea, is a question asked early and 
often. The common answer is found in the mistaken ideas 
of American geography then current. " How natural the 
' from sea to sea ' lines," it is said, " to those who thought that 
at most they would be but a few hundred miles in length ! 
How preposterous if the width of the continent had been 
known ! " But it is not certain that this is the true explanation. 
England claimed not only the coast that John Cabot had 
discovered, but all the lands lying beyond that coast. Virtu- 
ally she strove to incorporate into the public law of Europe 
a rule in conformity with this claim. She ultimately failed 
in both these efforts, owing to the resistance of France and 
Spain ; but at the time when these charters were given she 
was upholding both stoutly, and was ready to do anything 
that would strengthen her position. To include the whole 
breadth of the continent within colonial boundary lines might 
give a faint color of occupancy to her claim ; moreover, the 
charters of 1606, 1609, and 1620 all prove that, to the royal 
mmd, as well as to the companies that proposed to plant, 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. ^7 

great territorial limits were essential to colonies. Professor 
Alexander Johnston denies in toto " that the Crown made the 
Connecticut grant under ignorance, supposing that North 
America was far narrower than it proved to be." " The 
Plymouth Council, when it gave up its charter in 1635, noti- 
fied the king," he says, "tliat this grant was through all the 
main-land from sea to sea, being near about three tJwiisand 
■miles in length ; " and he adds that every geographer in Eng- 
land knew such to be the length of the Connecticut grant.' It 
is easy to make too much of the geographical information im- 
parted to the royal mind by the Plymouth Council. No 
doubt some men in England had correct views on this point 
in 1662; but the Virginia and Maryland maps of 165 i and 
1670, described in a former chapter, and similar contemporary 
facts, discredit the strong language used by Mr. Johnston. 
The fact is, the early erroneous views of North American 
geography gave place very slowly to correct views. The mag- 
nificent distances of the New World were not grasped by 
James I. and his contemporaries as realities ; and there is no 
reason to suppose that the king or his counsellors really un- 
derstood that the New England of 1620 embraced as many 
degrees of longitude as lie between the mouth of the Tagus 
and the mouth of the Euphrates. 

Sandys and Southampton did not administer the London 
Company in a manner to please the mean and narrow mind 
of James I. The king caused legal proceedings against the 
company to be instituted, and in 1624 the Court of King's 
Bench, by a writ of quo warranto, vacated the charter. There- 
after, as long as Virginia continued a British colony, her 
governors held their commissions from the Crown. The 
question as to the effect of this quo zvarranto on the territorial 
limits of the colony has often been asked and never satisfac- 
torily answered. The king had granted the northern half of 
his American claim, from sea to sea, to the Plymouth Com- 

' Connecticut, in Commonwealth Series, 281. 



78 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

pany, and there is no reason to think that the writ was in- 
tended to affect the limits of the colony, or to derange the 
king's dual plan of colonization. 

Passing the grant to Sir Robert Heath, which did not 
lead to permanent plantations, the first invasion of Virginia, 
as bounded in 1609, was on the north. 

In 1632 Charles I. granted to Lord Baltimore the prov- 
ince that the king, in honor of his queen, Henrietta Maria, 
called Maryland. These are the boundaries : 

"All that part of the Peninsula or Chersonese, lying in parts 
of America, between the ocean on the east and the Bay of 
Chesapeake on the west ; divided from the residue thereof by 
a right line drawn from the promontory or headland called 
Watkins's Point, situate upon the bay aforesaid, near the River 
Wighco on the west unto the main ocean on the east, and be- 
tween that boundary on the south unto that part of the Bay of 
Delaware on the north, which lieth under the fortieth degree 
of north latitude from the equinoctial, where New England is 
terminated ; and all the tract of that land within the metes 
underwritten (that is to say), passing from the said bay, called 
Delaware Bay, in a right line, by the degree aforesaid, unto the 
true meridian of the first fountain of the River Potomac ; 
thence verging toward the south unto the farther bank of the 
said river, and following the same on the west and south unto 
a certain place called Cinquack, situate near the mouth of said 
river, where it disembogues into the aforesaid Bay of Chesa- 
peake, and thence by the shortest line unto the aforesaid prom- 
ontory or place called Watkins's Point, so that the whole tract 
of land divided by the line aforesaid, between the main ocean 
and Watkins Point unto the promontory called Cape Charles, 
may entirely remain forever excepted to us. . . ." 

Virginia bitterly resisted this grant as an invasion of her 
jurisdiction, and she finally acknowledged Maryland as a sis- 
ter colony, only because she had no alternative. Virginia's 
composure does not seem to have been ruffled by the grant to 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 79 

Sir Robert Heath three years before ; but the Virginia of 
1632, like the Virginia of 1887, was comparatively isolated 
from the coast to the south, while the multitude of waters 
that mingle in the mouth of the great bay and flow out to- 
gether through the Capes invited her to follow them to their 
northern and northwestern sources. Moreover, the Virgin- 
ians called Maryland a " papist " settlement ; and they cov- 
eted the commercial privileges that the Marylanders en- 
joyed and they did not. But Virginia finally gave up fur- 
ther resistance, and entered on a discussion of boundary lines. 
Successively there arose two main points of dispute with 
Maryland, only one of which need be noticed here. 

In 1649 Charles II. granted to Lord HojDton the tract 
bounded by and within the heads of the Rappahannock and 
Potomac Rivers; in 1689 James II. confirmed this grant to 
Lord Culpepper, to whom it had passed by sale and purchase, 
and on Culpepper's death it descended to his son-in-law, Lord 
Fairfax. The grant was of the soil merely, and left the juris- 
diction in Virginia, as before. Nothing in the whole history 
of royal patents and charters is more absurd and tyrannical 
than this grant, for at the time it was originally made Charles I. 
had just been executed, and Charles II. was a fugitive. But 
in time the question arose whether the southern or the north- 
ern branch of the Potomac was the proper boundary between 
Virginia and Maryland. The answer to that question de- 
pended upon the answer to another one, viz., whether the 
first fountain or westernmost source of the Potomac was on 
the one branch or the other, which was at the time unknown. 
It suited Lord Fairfax to claim the northern branch, since 
that would give the greater extent to the Hopton grant ; but 
Maryland contended for the southern branch, on which the 
first fountain is really found. Virginia had an obvious motive 
for taking the same view of the matter as Fairfax. In 1736 a 
commission appointed by the Crown and Fairfax surveyed a 
line from the Rappahannock to the Potomac; in 1745 the 
king confirmed this line; and in 1746 a second commission 



80 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

planted the " Fairfax stone " in conformity with the Virginia 
view. Maryland was not consulted in the matter; but the 
"Fairfax stone," although Virginia, in 1776, relinquished to 
the adjacent States all the territories covered by their charters 
that had once belonged to her, has remained the southern ex- 
treme of the boundary line between Virginia and Maryland, 
from the Potomac to Mason and Dixon's line. 

The boundary descriptions of the three more southern 
States will be given without particular discussion. 

In 1663 Charles II. thus bounded the grant to the Caro- 
lina proprietors : 

. . . " All that territory or tract of groiind situate, Iving, 
and being within our dominions of America, extending from the 
north end of tiie island called Lucke Island, which lleth in the 
Southern Virginia seas, and within six-and-thirty degrees of 
the northern latitude, and to the west as far as the south seas, 
and so southerly as far as the River Saint Matthias, which bor- 
dereth upon the coast of Florida, and within one-and-thirty de- 
grees of northern latitude, and so Avest in a direct line as far as 
the south seas aforesaid." . 

Two years later this grant was enlarged as follows : 

. . . "All that province, territory, or tract of land situate, 
lying or being in our dominions of America, aforesaid, extend- 
ing north and eastward as far as the north end of Currituck 
river or inlet, upon a strait westerly line to Wyonoak Creek, 
which lies within or about the degrees of thirty-six and thirty 
minutes, northern latitude, and so west in a direct line as far as 
the South Seas ; and south and westward as far as the degree 
of twenty-nine, inclusive of northern latitude ; and so west in a 
direct line as far as the south sea." . . 

The Carolina charter of 1665 gave to history a memorable 
line. The parallel of 36° 30' is the boundary of six States, 
but its historical consequence arises more from the fact that 
the compromise of 1820 made it the boundary between slavery 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 8l 

and freedom beyond the western boundary of Missouri. Out 
of the Carolina grant two colonies were eventually made. 
The Revised Statutes of North Carolina define the boundary 
between them as a line running northwest from Goat Island 
on the west, in latitude 33° 56', to parallel 35°, and thence 
along that parallel to Tennessee. 

An independent plantation in South Carolina had been 
mooted as early as 1717, and in 1732 James Oglethorpe re- 
newed the proposition, and proposed to make the new colony 
a home and refuge for debtors in England who were unable 
to discharge their indebtedness, and for Protestants on the 
Continent who were persecuted for religion's sake. The plan 
pleased the king, and he granted to a corporation consisting 
of Oglethorpe and others a tract of country " in trust for the 
poor " that he thus bounded : 

"All those lands, countries, and territories situate, lying, and 
being in that part of South Carolina, in America, which lies 
from the most northern part of a stream or river there, commonly 
called the Savannah, all along the sea-coast to the southward, 
unto the most southern stream of a certain other great water or 
river called the Altamaha, and westerly from the heads of the 
said rivers, respectively, in direct lines to the south seas." 

The royal proclamation of 1763, which will be fully noticed 
in a future chapter, made some new territorial arrangements 
in the Gulf region. The lands lying between the rivers Alta- 
maha and St. Marys were annexed to Georgia. The southern 
boundary of that province now became the St. Marys and a 
straight line drawn from the source of that river to the con- 
fluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee ; and such has been 
its southern boundary until the present time. The grant 
made to the Georgia trustees in 1732 had bounded South 
Carolina on the southwest by the Savannah. 

The charter of 1620 imparted some new life to the Plym- 
outh Company, but it was never a vigorous corporation. 
However, both the company and the Crown at once began 
6 



82 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

to exploit the New England soil. No other part of the At- 
lantic coast is geographically so complex and intricate, and 
for this or some other reason its territorial history is more 
difficult than any other to trace out. The course of the com- 
pany and king alike has been described as but a course of 
confusion. Minutely to follow their work would require the 
skill of a trained lawyer in addition to the learning of an 
accomplished geographer and historian. Nothing beyond the 
outlines will here be attempted. 

In 162 1 the Council for New England, by direction of 
James I., issued a patent to Sir William Alexander, Earl of 
Stirling, conveying to him the region bounded by the St. Law- 
rence, the Ocean, and the St. Croix, styled "the Lordship and 
Barony of New Scotland." This grant was confirmed to the 
Earl by a royal charter of September loth, the same year. The 
Earl was still further favored, for by a patent dated April 22, 
1635, the council, this time by the direction of Charles L, 
gave him a " tract of the main land of New^ England, begin- 
ning at St. Croix, and from thence extending along the sea- 
coast to Pemaquid and the River Kennebeck," together with 
Long Island and all the islands thereto adjacent.' In 1663 
the heirs of the Earl sold this grant between the Kennebec 
and the St. Croix to the Earl of Clarendon, from whom it 
immediately passed to the Duke of York. 

The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth late in the year 1620, 
without any authority whatever; but June i, i62i,the Coun- 
cil for New England granted them a " roving patent," which 
assigned them no boundaries or settled place of habitation, but 
allowed one hundred acres of land to be taken up for every 
emigrant, with fifteen hundred acres for public buildings, and 
also empowered the grantees to make laws and to set up a 
government. This patent was issued in the name of John 
Pierce and certain other London merchants who had given 
the Pilgrims some financial assistance. In 1628 the council 

1 Vindication, etc., of Alexander, Earl of Stirling, 34. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 83 

gave Plymouth a tract of land on the Kennebec River, and 
the year following it gave them a new patent, much more 
favorable than the one given in Pierce's name in 162 1. The 
colony was now bounded west by a line drawn northerly from 
the mouth of Narragansett River, and on the north by a line 
drawn westerly from Cohasset Rivulet. The grant on the 
Kennebec made the previous year was included. The Plym- 
outh people made repeated attempts to obtain a charter from 
the Crown, which alone could confer prerogatives of govern- 
ment, but these attempts were never successful. 

In 1628 the Council at Plymouth made to Sir Henry Ros- 
well and others his associates in the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony an important grant, which was confirmed by Charles 
I., with powers of government, March 4, 1629. These are the 
boundaries of Massachusetts as defined by the Crown : 

. . "All that Parte of Newe England in Amirica which 
lyes and extendes betweene a great River there, conionlie called 
Monomack River, alias Merrimack River, and a certen other 
River there called Charles River, being in the Bottome of a 
certen Bay there, comonlie called Massachusetts, alias Matta- 
chusetts, alias Massatusetts Bay, and also all and singuler 
those Landes and Hereditaments whatsoever, lying within the 
Space of Three Englishe Myles on the South Parte of the said 
River called Charles River, or of any or every Parte thereof. 
And also all and singuler the Landes and Hereditaments what- 
soever, lying and being within the space of Three Englishe Miles 
to the southward of the southermost Parte of the said Baye, 
called Massachusetts, alias Mattachusetts, alias Massatusetts 
Bay: And also all those Landes and Hereditaments whatsoever, 
which lye and be within the space of Three English Myles to 
the Northward of the saide River, called Monomack, alias Mer- 
rymack, or to the Norward of any and every Parte thereof and 
all Landes and Hereditaments whatsoever, lyeing within the 
Lymitts aforesaide, North and South, in Latitude and Bredth, 
and in Length and Longitude, of and within all the Bredth 
aforesaide, throughout the Mayne Landes there from the Atlan- 



84 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tick and Westerne Sea and Ocean on the East Parte, to the 
South Sea on the West Parte. 

. " Provided ahvayes, That yf the said Landes . . . 
were [on November 3, 1620] actuallie possessed or inhabited by 
any other Christian Prince or State, or were within the Boundes, 
Lymytts or Territories of that Southerne Colony, then before 
graunted by our saide late Father . . . then this present 
Graunt shall not extend to any such partes or parcells thereof." 

The attempt to unify and harmonize the Northern New 
England patents and charters, real and pretended, is next door 
to a hopeless undertaking. I shall content myself with stat- 
ing the facts material to the present purpose. On November 
7, 1629, the Plymouth Council made to Captain John Mason, 
one of the principal adventurers in the company, a grant 
that, as reaffirmed in 1635, was thus bounded : 

"All that part of the Mayn Land of New England aforesaid, 
beginning from the middle part of Naumkeck River, and from 
thence to proceed eastwards along the Sea Coast to Cape Anne, 
and round about the same to Pischataway Harbour, and soe 
forwards vp within the river Newgewanacke, and to the fur- 
thest head of the said River and from tlience northwestwards 
till sixty miles bee finished, from the first entrance of Pischat- 
aqay Harbor, and alsoe from Naumkecke through the River 
thereof vp into the land west sixty miles, from which period 
to cross over land to the sixty miles end, accompted from 
Pischataway, through Newgewanacke River to the land north- 
west aforesaid ; and alsoe all that the South Halfe of the Ysles 
of Sholes, all which lands, with the Consent of the Counsel!, 
shall from henceforth be called New-hampshyre. And alsoe 
ten thousand acres more of land ... on the southeast part 
of Sagadihoc, at the mouth or entrance thereof, from hence- 
forth to bee called by the name of Massonia, etc." . . . 

There were earlier grants within the present limits of New 
Hampshire, but this one may be considered the origin of that 
commonwealth. It never had a royal charter, but the com- 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 85 

mission of 1680 to the governor had much the same effect. 
The feeble settlements within the limits of Mason's grant 
were annexed to Massachusetts in 1641 ; they became a royal 
colony in 1680; they became a second time a part of Massa- 
chusetts in 1690, but were again separated in 1692, from 
which time New Hampshire has had an independent exist- 
ence. 

In 1635 the Council at Plymouth renounced to the Crown 
their charter, first, however, dividing into eight shares, which 
they distributed among themselves, the territory of New Eng- 
land. It was ordered when this partition was made that all 
persons having lawful grants of land, or having made lawfully 
settled plantations, should enjoy the same on their surrendering 
their rights of jurisdiction {jura regalia) to the proprietor to 
whom the division fell. The grant of 1620 was from sea to sea, 
but this partition extended inland only sixty miles, save in one 
or two cases that reached twice that distance. It was intended 
to procure confirmations of these grants under the great seal, 
but this appears to have been done only in the case of Sir 
Ferdinando Gorges's portion, lying between the Piscataqua 
and Kennebec rivers, confirmed to him by royal charter in 
1639. This was " the province or county of Maine." The 
grant led to serious disputes with holders under earlier grants. 
Massachusetts claimed the whole district because it lies south 
of a due east and west line drawn three miles north of the 
lake in which the Merrimac has its rise, and she finally 
bought the Gorges title for ;^i,250. 

The Massachusetts charter of 1629 was cancelled by the 
High Court of Chancery in 1684. Four years later the Stuarts 
w^ere expelled the throne, and were succeeded by William and 
Mary. The new sovereigns favored a policy of colonial con- 
solidation. Accordingly, November 7, 1691, they granted to 
Massachusetts Bay a new charter which brought together 
under its jurisdiction all the colonies of Central and Northern 
New England, viz. : Plymouth, Massachusetts, Maine, includ- 
ing the grant between the St. Croix and the Kennebec made 



86 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

to Earl Stirling, and Nova Scotia. Maine, henceforth con- 
sisting of the original grants to Alexander west of the St. 
Croix, to Gorges, and to Plymouth, remained a part of Mas- 
sachusetts until admitted to the Union as a State in 1820. 
Plymouth remained permanently connected with the younger 
and stronger colony at the north, and thus brought Massa- 
chusetts down to the sea in the southeast. 

When New Hampshire's dependence upon Massachusetts 
came to an end in 1692, the territorial strifes of the two colo- 
nies began. New Hampshire cut Massachusetts, as bounded 
on the east by the St. Croix, in two ; so there were bounda- 
ries to be drawn on the east and on the south. Commissioners 
appointed by the tvv^o colonies failing to agree, these bounda- 
ries were referred, by the king's order, to commissioners ap- 
pointed by the neighboring colonies. The report of this 
board, confirmed by the king in 1740, and acquiesced in by 
Massachusetts, drew the eastern line practically where it is to- 
day. On the south, the report was less favorable to Massachu- 
setts. The charter of 1629 gave her all the lands lying within 
the space of three English miles to the northward of the 
River Merrimac and of every part thereof; the charter of 1635 
made the southern boundary of New Hampshire on the coast, 
the Naumkeck River, at Salem. The charter of 1691 reaf- 
firmed the boundary of 1629. Massachusetts insisted, there- 
fore, that her proper northern bonndary was a due east and 
west line running through a point three miles north of the 
inflow .of Lake Winnipiseogee, which would have blotted 
New Hampshire from the map. New Hampshire contended 
that her southern boundary was a latitudinal line running 
through a point three miles north of the mouth of the Merri- 
mac. The report that the king confirmed gave New Hamp- 
shire more than she asked for. It provided, " that the north- 
ern boundary of the province of Massachusetts be a similar 
curve line pursuing the course of the Merrimac River, at three 
miles distance, on the north side thereof, beginning at the At- 
lantic Ocean and ending at a point due north of Pautucket 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 8/ 

Falls, and a straight line drawn from thence, due west, till it 
meets with His Majesty's other governments." Massachu- 
setts refused to take part in surveying and marking this line, 
and it was done by New Hampshire alone in 1741 and 1742. 
It is the line of our map. 

The three towns that constituted the original Connecticut 
were settled by emigration from Massachusetts in 1636 and 
1637. It was then supposed that the ground on which Wind- 
sor, Hartford, and Weathersfield were planted belonged to that 
colony, and the three settlements remained for a year or two 
under its protection. The old story is that, afterward, the 
emigrants obtained a title or claim under a patent which 
proceeded from the Council of New England by the way of 
the Earl of Warwick to Lord Say and Sele and his asso- 
ciates ; but the existence of the grant to Warwick, and so 
the sufficiency of the old patent of Connecticut, is denied.' 
The New Haven colony, planted in 1638, had no other title 
than the one obtained -from the Indians by purchase. Both 
the settlers on the river and at New Haven had much trouble 
with the Dutch, who claimed all the coast from the Hudson 
to the Connecticut. It is, therefore, hard to see that either 
the Connecticut or the New Haven colonists had any title to 
the lands that they occupied, proceeding from the Crown, 
previous to the charter that constituted the Connecticut 
Company, granted by Charles II., April 23, 1662, which gave 
the colony the following limits : 

" We ... do give, grant and confirm unto the said 
Governor and Company, and their successors, all that part of 
our Dominions in Neio England in America bounded on the 
east by Narraganset River, commonly called Narraganset Bay, 
where the said River falleth into the Sea, and on the North by 
the Line of the Massachusetts Plantation ; and on the South by 
the sea ; and in Longitude as the Line of the Massachusetts Col- 

'Johnston: Connecticut, 8-10. 



88 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ony, running from East to West, that is to say, from the said Nar- 
ragansett Bay on the East, to the South sea on the West Part, with 
the Islands thereunto adjoining." 

This charter consolidated Connecticut and New Haven ; 
it cut into the grant made to Roger Williams and his asso- 
ciates in 1643 ; and it did not recognize the presence of the 
Dutch on the Hudson even to the extent of making the 
familiar reservation in favor of a Christian prince holding or 
Christian people inhabiting. 

In 1636 Roger Williams began the Providence plantation 
on a tract of land that he held either by gift or purchase from 
the Indians. Settlements were made on Rhode Island in 
1638 and 1639, and a beginning Was also made on the western 
coast of Narragansett Bay in 1643. An attempt of Massa- 
chusetts to extend her jurisdiction over these settlements was 
resisted as a usurpation. In 1643 Williams obtained from the 
Parliamentary Commissioners, the Earl of Warwick, Presi- 
dent, a charter of incorporation for the two plantations. 
In 1663 Charles II. granted a new charter, creating " the 
Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode 
Island and Providence Plantations in New England in 
America," that unified all the Bay colonies, and restored to 
Rhode Island her original limits, which had been invaded by 
the Connecticut charter of the year before ; an overlapping 
of grants that led to a long and bitter controversy. Boundary 
disputes between Massachusetts and the colonies on the south 
began in 1742, and they came to an end, if indeed the end be 
reached, only a few years ago. These disputes are among 
the most remarkable of their kind in our history. To follow 
them through the colonial and State legislatures, the com- 
missions colonial and State, the appeals to the Court of Eng- 
land and to the Supreme Court of the United States, would 
be a task as tedious as lengthy. Of course the first thing to 
be done was to fix a latitudinal line that should fall three 
miles south of the most southern point of Charles River. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 89 

"The northern boundary of the colony was not fully settled 
for more than a century. When Connecticut was settled, the 
Massachusetts southern line was in the air ; and in 1642 that 
colony sent two men, Woodward and Saffary, to run the line 
according to the charter. The surveyors are said to have been 
ignorant men ; and Connecticut authorities call them, lucus a 
non liiccndo, ' the mathematicians.' They began operations by 
finding what seemed to them a point 'three English miles, 
on the south part of the Charles River, or of any or every part 
thereof:' thence the southern Massachusetts line was to run 
west to the Pacific Ocean. The two mathematicians, however, 
either hesitating to undertake a foot journey to the Pacific, or 
doubting the sympathy of casual Indians with the advancement 
of science, and being sufficiently learned to know that two 
points are enough to determine the direction of a line, did not 
run the line directly west. Instead, they took ship, sailed 
around Cape Cod and up the Connecticut River, and found 
what they asserted to be a point in the same latitude as the 
first. In fact, they had got some eight miles too far to the 
south, thus giving their employers far too much territory ; but 
they had fulfilled their principal duty, which was to show that 
Springfield was in Massachusetts. An <!'.v parte survey, and of 
such a nature, could not, of course, be recognized by Connecti- 
cut. The oblong indentation in Connecticut's northern boun- 
dary is a remnant of the ignorance of Woodward and Saffary ; 
for Massachusetts claimed a line running just north of Wind- 
sor, and Connecticut finally reclaimed all but this oblong. She 
made ex parte surveys of her own in 1695 and 1702, and then 
both colonies appealed to the Crown. This was evidently a 
dangerous tribunal for both, and in 1714 they agreed on a com- 
promise line, much as it is at present." ' 

This line conforms in general to the parallel of 42° 2' ; it 
marks the southern limit of the Massachusetts claim and 
the northern limit of the Connecticut claim west of the 
Delaware. The disputes among the New England colonies 

' Johnston : Connecticut, 207, 208. 



90 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

will not be further followed, except to quote Rufus Choate's 
celebrated description of a phase of one of them. " The 
commissioners might as well have decided that the line 
between the States was bounded on the north by a bramble- 
bush, on the south by a bluejay, on the west by a hive of bees 
in swarming time, and on the east by five hundred foxes with 
firebrands tied to their tails " '—a description that would apply 
to a good deal of other boundary work done in colonial times. 
The cutting up of the territories assigned to the London and 
Plymouth Companies into two groups of colonies was mate- 
rially modified by the intrusion, within the dates of the James- 
town and Plymouth settlements, of a foreign body that thus far 
has not been mentioned. In 1609 Henry Hudson, who, with a 
Dutch commission, was then searching for a western passage 
to Cathay, found his way into New York Bay, and into the 
noble river that bears his name. The Dutch sent ships to 
the Hudson every year for several years, one motive being 
discovery and another trade with the Indians. At that time, 
it will be remembered, the French claimed the coast from 
the St. Lawrence to the Delaware ; moreover, the very year 
that Hudson ascended the river, Champlain ascended Lake 
Champlain almost to its source, when, fortunately, he turned 
back to Quebec. Then there was the Cabot title of the 
English, disregarding the claims of the Dutch and the French 
alike. The Dutch proceeded to fasten themselves firmly upon 
the mouth and valley of the river, which they called North 
River; and afterward less firmly upon the country east to 
Fresh River, as they called the Connecticut, and south to South 
River, as they called the Delaware. The whole country claimed 
by them they named New Netherlands. The English never 
acknowledged, but always denied, the validity of the Dutch 
title ; and it is now plain that, in view of the Cabot title, the 
geographical relations of the Hudson to the regions east and 
south, and to the interior of the continent, and the later supe- 



' Johnston : Connecticut, 209. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES, 91 

riority of the English, the ultimate ejection of Holland, if not 
of the Dutch, and the incorporation of New Netherlands into 
the English system, was only a question of time. The Dutch 
were in possession only fifty years ; but in that time they 
materially influenced American history, as well territorial as 
political and social. 

In some of the northern " from sea to sea " charters the 
King of England made the customary exemption of lands 
possessed by a Christian prince, or inhabited by Christian 
people ; but the fact that the presence of the Dutch was well 
known, and that they were regarded as intruders, would seem 
to show that the exemption did not apply to them, or at least 
was not meant to apply to them. Further, the Connecticut 
charter bounded that colony " on the south by the sea;" that 
is. Long Island Sound. 

We must also remember that the southern boundary of 
the New England of 1620 was parallel 40° north, a full de- 
gree south of the southernmost point of the New England 
of 1898. Save the futile Plowden Palatinate, neither the 
Council nor the Crown had attempted to assign this belt of 
territory to any grantee. This, no doubt, would have been 
done had not the Dutch been present in New Netherlands. 
We may be reasonably certain, at least, that, had it not 
been for the Dutch, the Hudson Valley would have become 
the seat of an English colony before the Connecticut lines 
were drawn in 1662. Perhaps Massachusetts and Connecti- 
cut would have protested against a colony at their, backs, 
cutting them off from the west ; but the noble river, the pict- 
uresque valley, the interior trade, the broad and fertile lands 
of the Mohawk, would have been attractions too strong for 
their opposition. The floods of the Hudson would have 
swept away their " from sea to sea " lines, if they had ever 
been really carried across that river. But while New York 
geographically is no part of New England, but has a distinct 
character of its own, it might have been, historically, a part 
of New England, and it is fair to presume that such would 



92 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

have been the case, had not the Dutch given another direc- 
tion to history. 

The long-sleeping English title to the Hudson was revived 
in 1664. On March 12th of that year, "divers good causes 
and considerations him thereto moving," Charles II., "of his 
especial grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion," gave and 
granted to his dearest brother, James Duke of York, his heirs 
and assigns — 

"All that part of the maine land of New England beginning 
at a certaine place called or knowne by the name of St. Croix 
next adjoyning to New Scotland in America and from thence 
extending along the sea coast unto a certain place called Petu- 
aquine or Pemaquid and so up the River thereof to the further 
head of ye same as it tendeth northwards and extending from 
thence to the River Kinebequi and so upwards by the shortest 
course to the River Canada northward and also all that Island 
or Islands commonly called by the severall name or names of 
Matowacks or Long Island scituate lying and being towards the 
west of Cape Codd and ye narrow Higansetts abutting upon 
the maine land between the two Rivers there called or knowne 
by the severall names of Conecticutt and Hudsons River to- 
gather also with the said river called Hudsons River and all the 
land from the west side of Conecticutt to ye east side of Dela- 
ware Bay and also all those severall Islands called or knowne 
by the names of Martin's Vinyard and Nantukes otherwise 
Nantuckett together with all ye lands islands soyles rivers har- 
bours mines minerals quarryes woods marshes waters lakes, etc." 

The next year a fleet sent out by the Royal Duke took 
possession of New Netherlands. A few years later the 
Dutch recovered the province for a single year ; but that ar- 
ticle of the Treaty of Westminster, 1674, which required the 
surrender by both parties of all conquests made in the course 
of the preceding war, remaining in the hands of the conqueror, 
gave the English a secure title as against the Dutch. A second 
charter, dated 1674, confirmed the Duke in possession of the 
province, the boundary descriptions remaining much as be- 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 93 

fore. The Duke gave the province the name by which it has 
since been known. 

That part of Maine included in the Duke of York's char- 
ter, Long Island, and some smaller islands to the east, had 
been bought by him the year before of the heirs of Earl 
Stirling, to whom they had fallen on the dissolution of the 
Plymouth Company, in 1635. Pemaquid, as the Maine 
tract was called, was annexed to Massachusetts in 1686, and 
it was confirmed to that colony by the charter of 1691. INIar- 
tha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and other islands in the neighbor- 
hood were also included within the same charter. Long 
Island, which Nature plainly intended to go with the country 
on the north side of the Sound, and the possession of which 
had been disputed by the Connecticut people and the Dutch, 
was henceforth attached to New York. At the date of the 
English conquest of New Netherlands, the English colonies 
east and southwest had become measurably adjusted to the 
Dutch ; but now matters were thrown into greater confusion 
than ever, and a new scries of adjustments became necessary. 
Before attempting a general account of these arrangements, 
we should take a closer look of some work that Charles II. 
did in the years 1662 to 1664. 

In the first of those years, he bounded Connecticut on the 
east by Narragansett Bay, and on the west by the Pacific 
Ocean ; thus jumping half the claim of Rhode Island, and 
wholly ignoring the Dutch on the Hudson. In the second 
year, he bounded Rhode Island on the west by the Paw- 
catuck, thus jumping the eastern part of the grant made the 
year before to Connecticut. In the third year, he not only 
gave the Hudson to his brother, but he made the eastern 
boundary of the Duke's province the Connecticut River, thus 
sanctioning the widest claim that the Dutch had ever made 
in that direction, and cutting away from one-third to one- 
half of the present limits of Massachusetts and Connecticut. 

The establishment of the Dutch on the Hudson, if not 
the geography of the country, had probably convinced Mas- 



94 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

sachusetts and Connecticut that their "from sea to sea" limits 
never would exist save on parchment. At all events, they 
never dreamed, now that the Hudson had passed into English 
hands, of resisting the royal will. New York must be recog- 
nized, as a matter of course, and the only thing now to do was 
to make the best terms as to boundaries that they could. 

The issue with Connecticut raised by the Duke's grant 
was referred to the Royal Commissioners for the Colonies, who 
promptly fixed a line twenty miles east of the Hudson ; but 
the second charter to York, 1674, reaffirmed the boundaries 
of 1664, and reopened the whole question. In 1683 Connect- 
icut agreed with Governor Dongan, of New York, upon a 
line that, with some rectifications, is the basis of the present 
boundary between the two States. In 1725 and 1737 the line 
was run practically where it is to-day ; but we have a curious 
example of how the boundary disputes of the seventeenth 
century project themselves forward in the fact that the line 
was resurveyed by New York in i860, agreed upon by the 
two States in 1878 and 1879, and ratified by Congress in 1881. 
The western boundary of Connecticut happens to fall, at the 
sea shore, on the forty-first degree of north latitude ; and that 
fact determines the latitude of a western line that we shall 
have occasion to consider hereafter. 

In the case of Massachusetts, as in the case of Connecticut, 
New York claimed eastward to Connecticut River. The con- 
test was so bitter that the two colonies never came to an agree- 
ment until 1773, and then the Revolution, coming on imme- 
diately after, prevented the running of the line until 1787. 
With a modification or two of no consequence for our purpose, 
the line of 1 773-1 787 stands to-day. 

Whether Massachusetts and Connecticut, or either of them, 
considered at the time what the effect of the lines of 1733 and 
1773 would be upon their claims in the interior, I have no 
means of knowing ; but it is certain that the Governor of Con- 
necticut, in 1720, had spoken of New York as cutting that 
colony " asunder," and that a few years later Connecticut men 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 95 

were making their way into the wilderness west of the Dela- 
ware. When the two States were afterward told that by con- 
senting to the lines east of the Hudson they had barred their 
own charter-rights to extend farther west, they replied that 
the Duke of York's grant was bounded on the west by the 
Delaware, that he had jumped them, therefore, only to that 
limit, and that their consenting to the fact in no sense barred 
them west of his boundary. 

No part of the whole coast was more sought after, or was 
the scene of more experiments in colonization, than the Dela- 
ware country and the region east of it to the ocean. The 
Swedes, the Fins, the Dutch, and men from New Haven, 
all mingled in the opening scenes in that region ; and it 
was in New Jersey that Sir Edmund Plowden sought to set 
up the palatinate of "New Albion." In 1655 the country 
passed into the hands of the Dutch, who, however, received it 
only as trustees for the nation whose navigators had discov- 
ered the continent. The Duke of York laid claim, when the 
time came, to the western side as well as the eastern side of 
the river, although it was not included in his grant, basing the 
claim on the Dutch capitulation. In 1664, two months before 
the expedition sent to the Hudson sailed, the Duke sold to 
Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret a territory that 
he thus described : 

"All that tract of land adjacent to New England, and lying- 
and being to the westward of Long Island and Manhitas Island, 
and bounded on tlie east part by the main sea and part by 
Hudson's River, and hath upon the west Delaware Bay or 
river, and extendeth southward to the main ocean as far as 
Cape May, at the mouth of Delaware Bay, and to the north- 
ward as far as the northernmost branch of the said bay or 
river of Delaware, which is forty-one degrees and forty min- 
utes of latitude, and crosseth over thence in a strait line to 
Hudson's River in forty-one degrees of latitude ; which said 
tract of land is hereafter to be called by the name or names 
of New Ceaserea or New Jersey." 



96 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

New Jersey had a changeful history until 1702, when the 
proprietors surrendered the province to the Crown. Royal 
Commissioners fixed the boundary line between the colony 
and New York substantially where it is to-day, in 1769. 

In the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York 
grants, we find the key to another memorable territorial con- 
test. The Massachusetts of 1629 included all lands lying 
within the space of three English miles to the northward of 
any and every part of Merrimac River. The New Hamp- 
shire of 1635 reached on the south to the Naumkeck, and on 
the west sixty miles inland. The commissioners of 1740, to 
whom the dispute between the two colonies was referred, laid 
down a line three miles north of the Merrimac, following its 
course to a point north of Pawtucket Falls, and then proceed- 
ing due west " till it meets with His Majesty's other govern- 
ments." Under this decision New Hampshire claimed that 
she extended as far west as Massachusetts, but Massachusetts 
continued to assert her right to the country west of Connecti- 
cut River extending north to the possessions of France. New 
York said the region between Lake Champlain and Connect- 
icut River belonged to her, under the grant of 1664, 1674. 
New Hampshire and Massachusetts claimed that New York 
was barred by the twenty-mile line drawn by the Royal Com- 
missioners between Connecticut and New York in 1664; but 
New York denied that this line held north of Massachusetts, 
and in 1764 the King in Council decided the issue in her favor. 
Both before and after the decision of 1740 was rendered, Mas- 
sachusetts and New Hampshire made grants of land in the 
disputed district. Settlers from all the New England colo- 
nies flowed into the territory, and especially from Connecticut. 
After the king's decision of 1764 New York strove to extend 
her jurisdiction over the " New Hampshire Grants," as the 
district came to be called. She repudiated the New Eng- 
land titles of land-holders, and sought to compel the set- 
tlers to purchase anew of her. This was the beginning of the 
long and bitter quarrel between the " Green Mountain Boys " 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 97 

and the " Yorkers." The settlers made common cause against 
New York's selfish policy. Their determination to maintain 
their titles and to repel aggression ripened into a desire for in- 
dependence. In 1777 a convention declared the Grants a sepa- 
rate and independent State, with the name of " New Connect- 
icut," The next year a constitution was adopted and the 
name Vermont selected. It is hardly too much to say that 
Vermont was before Congress asking for admission to the 
circle of States for fifteen years. For much of that time the 
people hardly considered themselves a part of the United 
States at all ; they denied allegiance to all other States, and 
were not a State themselves. Through the Revolution they 
waged a separate war against Great Britain, and even entered 
into negotiations for a separate peace. Their condition is an 
anomaly in the history of our system. Not to touch on in- 
termediate points, Vermont was finally admitted to the Union 
in 1 79 1. 



VII. 

THE THIRTEEN COLONIES AS CONSTITUTED 
BY THE ROYAL CHARTERS.— (II.) 



We come now to a charter that is the source of more 
boundary disputes than any other in our whole history. 
This is the charter given to William Penn, in 1681, by Charles 
II,, in discharge of a debt that the king owed to Penn's father. 

"... all that Tract or Parte of Land in America, 
with all the Islands therein conteyned, as the same is 
bounded on the East by Delaivare River, from twelve miles 
distance Northwards of New Castle Towne unto the three and 
fortieth degree of Northerne Latitude, if the said River doeth 
extende so farre Northwards ; But if the said River shall not 
extend soe farre Northward, then by the said River soe farr as 
it doth extend ; and from the head of the said River the East- 
erne Bounds are to bee determined by a Meridian Line, to bee 
drawne from the head of the said River, unto the said three 
and fortieth Degree. The said Lands to extend westwards five 
degrees in longitude, to bee computed from the said Easterne 
Bounds ; and the said Lands to bee bounded on the North by 
the beginning of the three and fortieth degree of Northern 
Latitude, and on the South by a Circle drawne at twelve miles 
distance from New Castle Northward and Westward unto the 
beginning of the fortieth degree of Northern Latitude, and 
then by a straight Line Westward to the Limitt of Longitude 
above mentioned." 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 99 

Penn proceeded at once to extend his province and to per- 
fect his title. He bought Delaware of the Duke of York, and 
also obtained from him the relinquishment of all his claim to 
the western shore of the river above the twelve-mile circle, 
which had been drawn to leave the town of New Castle and 
neighborhood in the Duke's hands. The Duke's deeds to 
Penn, which bear the date 1682, completed the limitation of 
his province of New York on the sea-coast. 

The grant to Penn confused the old controversy between 
Virginia and Lord Baltimore as to their boundary, and led to 
fresh controversies. The question soon arose : " What do the 
descriptions ' the beginning of the fortieth,' and * the begin- 
ning of the three and fortieth degree of northern latitude ' 
mean ? " If they meant the fortieth and forty-third paral- 
lels of north latitude, as most historians have held, Penn's 
province was the zone, three degrees of latitude in width, 
that leaves Philadelphia a little to the south and Syracuse a 
little to the north ; but if those descriptions meant the belts 
lying between 39° and 40°, and 42° and 43°, as some authors 
have held, then Penn's southern and northern boundaries 
were 39° and 42° north. A glance at the map of Penn- 
sylvania will show the reader how different the territorial 
dispositions would have been if either one of these construc- 
tions had been carried out. The first construction w^ould 
avoid disputes on the south, unless with Virginia west of 
the mountains ; on the north it would not conflict with New 
York, but would most seriously conflict with Connecticut and 
Massachusetts west of the Delaware. The second construc- 
tion involved disputes wath the two Southern colonies con- 
cerning the degree 39-40 to the farthest limit of Pennsylvania, 
and it also overlapped Connecticut's claim to the degree 41- 
42. Perhaps we cannot certainly say what was the intention 
of the king, or Penn's first understanding ; but the Quaker pro- 
prietary and his successors adopted substantially the second 
construction, and thus involved their province in the most 
bitter disputes. 



lOO THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The first quarrel was with Lord Baltimore. It has been well 
said that this "notable quarrel" "continued more than eighty 
years ; was the cause of endless trouble between individuals ; 
occupied the attention not only of the proprietors of the 
respective provinces, but of the Lords of Trade and Planta- 
tions, of the High Court of Chancery, and of the Privy Coun- 
cils of at least three monarchs ; it greatly retarded the settle- 
ment and development of a beautiful and fertile country, and 
brought about numerous tumults, which sometimes ended in 
bloodshed." ' The eastern boundary of Maryland was Dela- 
ware Bay and River, from the intersection of the line drawn 
across the peninsula from Watkins's Point to the main ocean, 
on the south, " into that part of the Bay of Delaware on the 
north which lieth under the fortieth degree of north latitude 
from the equinoctial where New England is terminated," on 
the north ; the northern boundary was " the fortieth parallel 
from the bay to the true meridian of the first fountain of 
the River Potomac." But Baltimore's charter described the 
country granted to him as " not yet cultivated," hactenus in- 
ailta ; and at once, on his taking possession in 1634, the 
question arose whether this was a mere description of the 
land, or a condition of the grant equivalent to the familiar 
" not actually possessed by any Christian prince nor inhab- 
ited by Christian people " of the seventeenth-century charters. 
Some Virginians were already within the limits marked out 
for Baltimore when the Ark and the Dove entered the St. 
Marys. , Notably, Claiborne had set up his trading-post on 
Kent Island in 1632 ; and, not unnaturally, hactenus incidta 
was at once invoked in the Virginia interest. After much 
strife and some bloodshed, this controversy was finally set- 
tled in Baltimore's favor. In 1659, when Baltimore attempted 
to expel them from his limits, the Dutch said hactenus inculta 
applied to them as the first possessors of the country; and 
historians of our day have invoked the phrase in the Dutch 



' Scaife : Pennsylvania Magazine of History, 1885, 241. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. lOI 

interest. Considering that the Kings of England never ac- 
knowledged the Dutch claims on the Delaware more than on 
the Hudson, it would not be necessary to notice this point 
but for one fact. Such title as the Dutch had, passed by 
conquest to the Duke of York, in 1664, who sold it to Penn ; 
and he did not fail to make the most of it in maintaining his 
cause against his Southern neighbor. 

But the principal contention between Penn and Baltimore 
grew out of the inconsistent and conflicting boundaries that 
the Crown had given them. First, Baltimore's northeast 
corner should be " in the Bay of Delaware " as well as on the 
fortieth parallel, while the fortieth parallel crosses the Dela- 
ware many miles north of the head of the bay. We are forced 
to the conclusion that Charles I. intended to bound Baltimore 
on the north by the fortieth parallel, for we cannot suppose 
that he intended, in 1632, to leave either for Virginia or the 
Crown a narrow strip of territory south of the New England 
line ; but it was very unfortunate for Baltimore that the refer- 
ence to the bay left open a door for Penn to enter with his 
equally impossible boundary, when the day came to deal with 
him. Penn's southern boundary was " a circle drawn at twelve 
miles distance from New Castle northward and westward unto 
the beginning of the fortieth degree of northern latitude, and 
thence by a straight line westward " to the limit of longitude 
fixed by the charter. There was a dispute whether this circle 
should be drawn " horizontally" or " superficially ; " but no 
matter which way it was drawn, it would not touch either 
the thirty-ninth or the fortieth degree of latitude. 

Definite and precise as the boundaries of 1632 and 168 1 
apparently were, it is clear that they were drawn in ignorance 
of the geography of the Delaware region. Nor was this ig- 
norance soon removed ; maps of the next century are extant 
on which the heads of both Delaware and Chesapeake Bays 
are laid down north of the fortieth parallel.' Moreover, the 

' Scaife : Pennsylvania Magazine of History, 1885, 248. 



I02 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

mistake consisted in carrying the parallel too far south, rather 
than in bringing the heads of the bays too far north ; at least 
both Penn and Baltimore were surprised to find, when they 
came to make surveys, that parallel falling so far north. 

The proofs that the king intended to bound Penn on the 
south by the fortieth parallel are the fact that said parallel 
was the southern boundary of New England, established in 
1620, and the Maryland charter. Baltimore stood stoutly 
for that construction of his charter, relying on the literal 
force of the language. Penn claimed to the thirty-ninth paral- 
lel, but he could hardly have expected at any time to main- 
tain that line. Plis determination was to gain a frontage on 
both Delaware and Chesapeake Bay, and to push his southern 
boundary as far south as possible. Fortunately for Penn and 
unfortunately for Baltimore, Penn's line must touch the twelve- 
mile circle, as well as be " the beginning of the fortieth de- 
gree," while Baltimore's northern line must touch Delaware 
Bay as well as be the fortieth degree. It will be seen that 
each one of the descriptions contains a major and a minor 
point ; and also that the two major points supported Balti- 
more's, and the two minor points Penn's pretensions. Hence 
Penn urged that the particular and the definite should control 
the general and the indefinite. This was holding that the 
Delaware Bay and the twelve-mile-circle limitations should 
override those in regard to the fortieth degree. Penn had a 
further advantage in the fact that he had obtained his title to 
the three counties of Delaware, which were also within Balti- 
more's grant, by purchase from the Duke of York. First and 
last, Baltimore stood for his charter-line, while Penn was dis- 
posed to compromise, but not in such a way as to give the 
Delaware counties to his rival or to surrender Philadelphia. 

After conferences, arguments, propositions, litigations in the 
courts and hearings before the Privy Council, the proprietors 
compromised the case in 1760. This compromise, which 
practically carried out an older one, as well as a decision by 
Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, was to this effect : (i) To run a 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 105 

due east and west line across the peninsula through Cape 
Henlopen (but not the Henlopen of our maps) ; (2) to run a 
line from the middle of this Henlopen line tangent to the 
twelve-mile circle drawn horizontally ; (3) to run a line from 
the point where the tangent touches the circle due north to 
the parallel of latitude fifteen miles south of the southern 
limit of Philadelphia ; (4) to run the said parallel of latitude — 
the lands north and east of this series of lines to belong to 
Pennsylvania, the lands south and west to Maryland. The 
proprietors sent over two distinguished mathematicians, Jere- 
miah Mason and Charles Dixon, who established the various 
lines in the years 1763-67. The east and west line, which 
they ran and marked two hundred and forty-four miles west 
of the Delaware, is the Mason and Dixon's line of history, so 
long the boundary between the free and the slave States. Its 
precise latitude is 39° 43' 26.3 " north. The Penns did not, 
therefore, gain the degree 39-40, but they did gain a zone 
one-fourth of a degree in width, south of the fortieth degree, 
to their western limit, because the decision of 1760 controlled 
that of 1779, made with Virginia. Had the heads of the 
two bays really extended north of the fortieth degree, we 
should no doubt have seen the Penns struggling to limit 
Baltimore by that line, rather than by a point in Delaware 
Bay, and to carry their grant north to latitude 43°. As it is, 
Pennsylvania is narrower by nearly three-fourths of a degree 
than the charter of 1681 contemplated. No doubt, however, 
the Penns considered the narrow strip gained at the south 
more valuable than the broad one lost at the north. With 
the Revolution, Delaware ceased to be a dependency of Penn- 
sylvania, and became an independent State with the boun- 
daries of 1760. 

But the grant to Penn conflicted with the Virginia boun- 
daries of 1609. No matter whether the beginning of the for- 
tieth degree meant the thirty-ninth or the fortieth parallel, it 
would cut that northwest line running " throughout from sea 
to sea " which that province claimed as her northern boun- 



104 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

daiy. The issue was not raised as soon as the issues between 
Maryland and the other two States, for an obvious reason ; 
but that great awakening to Western interests that followed 
the close of King George's war in 1748 brought it at once to 
the fore, Virginians and Pennsylvanians alike now began to 
find their way over the mountains, not furtively, as hunters, 
but openly, as traders and tillers of the soil, and their meeting 
in the valley of the Upper Ohio was alone sufficient to force 
the issue. Besides, building works of defence against the 
Indians and the French, that the renewed mutterings of war 
made necessary, hastened it. The controversy began for- 
mally in 1752, eight years before Penn and Baltimore reached 
their agreement and fifteen years before Mason and Dixon 
planted their two hundred and forty-fourth mile-post from 
the Delaware. 

Mention has already been made of Governor Spotswood's 
famous ride over the Blue Ridge in 17 16. The Virginians 
had been one hundred and ten years in reaching the Valley of 
Virginia, and even then the glowing reports that the gov- 
ernor's company made of its fertility and beauty did not lead 
to its immediate settlement. But in 1738 the General As- 
sembly created Augusta County, bounding it on the east by 
the Blue Ridge and on the west and northwest by "the ut- 
most limits of Virginia." Whether these limits were the 
Pacific Ocean or the Mississippi River, they included all West- 
ern Pennsylvania. Accordingly, when the Pennsylvanians 
began to settle west of the mountains they were within the 
limits of a Virginia county already organized. When Wash- 
ington led the Virginia Blues into that region to dispute the 
progress of the French, he went not only to defend the terri- 
tory of His Britannic Majesty, but also to defend the territory 
of the Old Dominion. Moreover, the Pennsylvania Assembly 
declined Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddle's proposal to assist 
in fortifying the Forks of the Ohio, on grounds that gave 
Lord Dunmore some advantage in the correspondence with 
Governor Penn, soon to be mentioned. To stimulate volun- 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. IO5 

teering in 1754, Governor Dinwiddle issued a proclamation 
offering 200,000 acres of land in bounties, 100,000 near the 
Forks of the Ohio, to be called the " garrison lands," and tlie 
remainder down the river, and this was in part the stimulus 
that brought into the field the force that Washington com- 
manded that year. While the Pennsylvanians were too apa- 
thetic to assist the Virginia governor in building the pro- 
posed fortifications, they would not brook this invasion of 
their rights. Governor Hamilton expostulated, and Dinwid- 
dle defended himself on the ground that the issue was doubt- 
ful and the case urgent. The grant was approved by the 
king, 1763, but it was not until the very eve of the Revolu- 
tion that the patents were issued to the claimants.' 

Braddock's defeat gave the French commander on the Ohio 
the opportunity that he so well improved, and also so well 
described, of "ruining the three adjacent provinces, Pennsylva- 
nia, Maryland, and Virginia, driving off the inhabitants, and 
totally destroying the settlements from a tract of country 
thirty leagues wide reckoning from the line of Fort Cumber- 
land ;"° and of course adjourned the boundary war until the war 
of arms should cease. With the fall of Fort Duquesne into 
the hands of the English in 1758, settlers began again to find 
their way to the valleys of the streams flowing to the Missis- 
sippi. For some years Virginia allowed her claim to the part 
of Pennsylvania west of the mountains to sleep ; she did not 
even remonstrate when Mason and Dixon carried their line 
west of the meridian of the "Fairfax stone; " but Virginians, 
as well as Pennsylvanians, continued to make their way into 
the disputed region. In 1769 the lands about Pittsburg 

' In some cases, at least, patents for land in Pennsylvania issued by the Gov- 
ernor of Virginia were affirmed by Pennsylvania courts. Thus, in 1775, Lord Dun- 
more gave Washington a patent for 2,813 acres, described as being in Augusta 
County, Virginia, on the waters of Miller's run, etc., that are within Wasliington 
County, Pennsylvania. The lands were occupied by squatters, who denied the 
validity of the title, but the Pennsylvania court sustained the patent and ejected 
the intruders in 1784. Buttertield : Washington and Crawford Letters, 73. 

' Parkman : Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 329. 



I06 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

were surveyed for the Pennsylvania proprietors, and settle- 
ments under the government of this province now became 
more rapid. Bedford County, embracing all Western Pennsyl- 
vania as claimed by the Penns, was organized in 1771, and 
Westmoreland County, embracing the part of Bedford west 
of Laurel Hill, in 1773. This region was also included in 
Augusta County, Virginia, as already related. The result was, 
that some of the inhabitants sided with one State, some with 
the other, and some with neither. As early as 1771 the more 
turbulent entered into an agreement, which they proclaimed 
openly, to keep off all officers of the law whatever, under a 
penalty of ;^50, to be forfeited by the party who should re- 
fuse to keep the contract.' Arthur St. Clair, of whom we 
shall soon hear more on a greater theatre of action, made 
his home in the disputed district in 1770, where he became 
first a surveyor, and then a magistrate, with a Pennsylvania 
commission. In January, 1774, Dr. John Connolly, who fig- 
ures in the history of those times as a land-jobber and politi- 
cal tool of Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, appeared 
at the Forks of the Ohio with a commission from his Lord- 
ship, with the high-sounding title of " Captain-Commandant 
of the Militia of Pittsburg and its dependencies." Connolly 
seized Fort Pitt, dismantled two years before, named it Fort 
Dunmore, and issued a proclamation declaring that the Gov- 
ernor of Virginia was about to take steps to redress the griev- 
ances of the people of the region, and calling them to meet as 
a militia the twenty-fifth of that month. St. Clair caused him 
to be arrested for the act, but he was soon released on his own 
recognizance. Afterward Pennsylvania magistrates were ar- 
rested and hurried off to Staunton in the Virginia Valley. 

The arrest of Connolly led to a correspondence between 
Governors Penn and Dunmore, to only one feature of which 
attention will be paid. Penn stated that, according to the 
Pennsylvania calculations. Fort Pitt was " near six miles east- 



' St. Clair Papers, I., 258. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 10/ 

ward of the Western extent of the province." Dunmore re- 
jected this view, and asserted the Virginia claim. He also said 
that the Pennsylvania Assembly, at the time when Dinwiddie 
was proposing to fortify the Upper Ohio, had admitted that 
Pittsburg was not within the limits of that government ; but 
Penn replied denying that the assembly had made such an 
admission, and affirming that the act would not conclude any- 
thing if the assembly had done so. 

In May, Messrs. Tilghman and Allen,, appointed commis- 
sioners on the part of Pennsylvania, visited Williamsburg to 
arrange matters, if possible. Propositions were made on both 
sides, and all were rejected. 

Meantime the strife went on. St. Clair wrote in 1774 : 
" As much the greatest part of the inhabitants near the line 
have removed from Virginia, they are inexpressibly fond of 
everything that comes from that quarter, and their minds are 
never suffered to be at rest." ' He also describes the panic as 
so great that it threatened to depopulate the country. He 
charged Dunmore with desiring to bring on an Indian war, 
which charge proved to be true. His Lordship Avas more than 
suspected of having an interest in lands over which he pro- 
posed to extend the jurisdiction of Virginia. Governor Penn 
told the Westmoreland magistrates that, as he could not raise 
a militia like the Governor of Virginia, it was vain to contend 
with the Virginians " in the way of force," and warned them 
not to enter into such contests with Dunmore's officers, or 
even to proceed against them by way of criminal prosecution 
for exercising the powers of government. Dunmore himself 
visited Pittsburg; and in 1775 the Augusta County Court 
sat for two terms at Pittsburg, at which terms Pennsylva- 
nians were arraigned for defying Virginia authority. Finally, 
the Pennsylvanians carried Connolly off to Philadelphia, and 
then the Virginians retaliated by sending some Pennsylvanians 
to Wheeling as hostages. 

' St. Clair Papers, I., 284. 



I08 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

It is but fair to say that this unhappy controversy was 
forced by Lord Dunmore rather than by Virginia. He 
continued to carry things with a strong hand, despite the 
steady resistance of the Pennsylvania authorities, down to 
the Indian war that takes its name from him, which was an- 
other part of his arbitrary Western policy, and even to the 
time when he went on board the man-of-war that saved him 
from the vengeance of the Virginians. 

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the confused 
state of affairs in those Pennsylvania wilds than the conduct 
of Colonel William Crawford, the mention of whose name 
always suggests the terrible tragedy that closed his life. 
Crawford was a Virginian by birth, and marched to Fort Du- 
quesne with the Virginia troops in 1758. In 1765 he made his 
home on the Youghiogheny River, in the disputed district. 
He was Washington's Western land-agent for many years, and 
his letters to him and to St. Clair throw much light on the 
events in the midst of which he moved. He accepted a com- 
mission as a Pennsylvania magistrate in 1770, and sided with 
this State in the boundary-controversy until 1774; then, ac- 
cepting a commission from Dunmore, he took an active part 
in the Indian war, calling out from St. Clair the remark : " I 
don't know how gentlemen account for these things to them- 
selves ; " and afterward he became a Virginia magistrate for 
the County of Augusta. 

At the opening of the Revolution the dispute between the 
two States threatened danger to the patriot cause. The sub- 
ject did not come before Congress as a body, but, July 25, 
1775, the members of Congress united in the following rec- 
ommendation to the people living in the disputed territory : 
"We recommend it to you that all bodies of armed men, 
kept up by either party, be dismissed ; and that all those on 
either side who are in confinement, or on bail, for taking part 
in the contest, be discharged."' And this was the end of 
active strife. 



' St. Clair Papers, I., 361. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. IO9 

In 1779 commissioners appointed by the two States met at 
Baltimore to agree upon the common boundaries of Pennsyl- 
vania and Virginia. In the ensuing correspondence the Penn- 
sylvania commissioners had much to say of " the beginning 
of the fortieth degree," the Virginia commissioners much of 
the twelve-mile circle. On both sides there was an evident 
desire to end the dispute. Various lines were proposed and 
rejected. On August 31 the commissioners signed this agree- 
ment : " To extend Mason and Dixon's line due west five 
degrees of longitude, to be computed from the River Dela- 
ware, for the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, and that a 
meridian line drawn from the western extremity thereof to 
the northern limit of the said State be the western boundary 
of Pennsylvania forever." ' This contract was duly ratified 
by the legislatures of the two States. In 1785 Mason and 
Dixon's line was extended, and the southwestern corner of 
Pennsylvania established. The " Pan-handle" is what was left 
of Virginia east of the Ohio River and north of Mason and 
Dixon's line, after the boundary was run from this point to 
Lake Erie in 1786.^ 

Ere this Virginia had acknowledged, in her constitution 
of 1776, the validity of the grants made at her expense so 
far as the shore States are concerned. 

"The territories, contained within the charters, erecting the 
colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina, 
are hereby ceded, released, and forever confirmed to the people 
of these Colonies respectively, with all the rights of property, 
jurisdiction, and government, and all other rights whatsoever, 
which might, at any time heretofore, have been claimed by 
Virginia, except the free navigation and use of the rivers Pato- 

' The correspondence is found in X. Hening's Statutes of Virginia. 

^ "When the State of Ohio was formed, in 1802, tlie Pan-handle first showed 
its beautiful proportions on the map of the United Slates. It received its name 
in legislative debate from Hon. John McMillan, delegate from Brooke County, 
to match the Accomac projection, which he dubbed the Spoon-handle." — Cregh. 
Hist. Wash. Co., Pa., quoted by Butterfield. Crawford's Expedition, 14, note. 



no THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

maque and Pokomoke, with the property of the Virginia shores 
and strands, bordering on either of the said rivers, and all im- 
provements, which have been, or shall be made thereon." 

The most serious of all the disputes that originated in the 
grant to William Penn was that with Connecticut ; a dispute 
that, in the words of a Pennsylvania writer, " was over the 
political jurisdiction and right of soil in a tract of country 
containing more than 5,000,000 acres of lands ; " that " in- 
volved the lives of hundreds, was the ruin of thousands, and 
cost the State millions ; " that " wore out one entire genera- 
tion;" that "evoked strong partisanship," was "urged, on 
both sides, by the highest skill of statesmen and lawyers," 
and was " righteously settled in the end." ' 

The grant made to Penn, carried to latitude 43° north, 
jumped half a dozen New England charters ; carried to 42° 
north, it jumped all those in which Connecticut was inter- 
ested, and notably the one given by Charles II. to the Gov- 
ernor and Company of Connecticut in 1662. West of the 
Delaware, south of the forty-second parallel, north of the 
forty-first, and east of the western limit of Pennsylvania, was 
the tract of 5,000,000 acres that the two colonies claimed ; a 
tract full of coal, iron, and oil, and of great fertility. Appar- 
ently the earliest intimation that anybody in Connecticut 
was thinking of these Western lands is found in a letter 
written to the Lords of Trade in 1720, by Governor Salton- 
stall : " On the west the province of New York have carried 
their claim and government through this colony from north 
to south, and cut tis asunder twenty miles east of the Hud- 
son." 

New Haven had taken an early interest in the Delaware 
region. At one time there was a considerable probability that 
the major part of the town would go there in a body; and Mr. 



' Hoyt : Brief of a Title in the Seventeen Townships in the County of Lu- 
zerne, 5. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. Ill 

Levermore says that after 1666 the New Haven of Davenport 
and Eaton must be sought upon the banks of the Passaic/ 

Following the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle there was a great 
outburst of interest in the West, and particularly in Virginia 
and Connecticut ; the first finding her " West " in the (3hio 
Valley, and the second hers in the Susquehanna country. 
Connecticut was now well filled up with people, according to 
the ideas of those days, and a scheme to settle the colony's 
lands west of New York was thrown before the public in 
1753- One hundred petitioners, many of them of high stand- 
ing in the colony, asked the General Court for a grant of land. 
The Susquehanna Company was organized to promote the 
scheme; and in 1755 the General Court recommended it to 
the favor of the king. 

The company sent its agents to Albany in 1754, when the 
Albany Congress was in session, where they purchased from 
certain Iroquois chiefs, for p^2,ooo, a tract of land lying within 
the Connecticut parallels, one hundred and twenty miles in 
length, from ten miles cast of the Susquehanna westward. 

Another important thing was done at Albany in 1754. 
The Congress itself, by a unanimous vote, not even the 
Pennsylvania Commissioners objecting, adopted a series of 
resolutions declaring the validity of the Western claims of 
the three colonies, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, 
within their chartered limits. Besides, the Plan of Union 
recommended by the Congress provided a machinery for 
carrying on Western colonization ; and Franklin, in his notes 
on the "plan," remarked that " the from 'sea to sea' colonies, 
having boundaries three thousand or four thousand miles in 
length to one or two hundred in breadth, must in time be re- 
duced to domains more convenient for the common purposes 
of government."" 

In 1755 the Susquehanna Company sent out surveyors to 

' The Republic of New Haven, 1 13-120. 
^Sparks: Writings of Franklin, HI., 32-55. 



112 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

survey the lands on the Lackawaxen and in the Wyoming Val- 
ley. The colonization-fever rose so high that a second com- 
pany, called the Delaware Company, was organized, and this 
also made a purchase of lands from the Indians. Notwith- 
standing the French and Indian war, a settlement was made 
on the Delaware in 1757, and another on the Susquehanna in 
1762. In 1768 the elder company directed the survey of five 
townships in the heart of the Wyoming Valley, and in the 
same year Captain Zebulon Butler, with forty men, took pos- 
session of one of them, taking the precaution to build a fort 
as a protection against the Indians, and possibly the Pennsyl- 
vanians also. 

Thus far the Penns had done nothing but object to the 
Susquehanna Company and its aims. Up to 1769 not a single 
Pennsylvania settler was anywhere in the neighborhood of 
the plantings that the Connecticut men had made. But now 
the proprietors began to bestir themselves. They improved 
the opportunity furnished by the Congress at Fort Stanwix, in 
1768, to buy " of the Indians all that part of the province of 
Pennsylvania not heretofore purchased of the Indians," and 
this included the whole Connecticut claim. They also began 
to lease lands in the Connecticut district on the condition that 
the lessees should defend them against the Connecticut claim- 
ants ; and the attempt of these lessees to oust the settlers 
already in possession, backed by the Pennsylvania authorities, 
brought on a skirmish of writs and arrests that soon led to the 
first " Pennamite and Yankee War," in which the lessees liter- 
ally, and the settlers figuratively, spread out as their respec- 
tive banners the Penn leases and the charter of 1662. 

Connecticut men pressed into the territory in increasing 
numbers. The accomplished historian of Windham County 
says : " The fertility of the soil, the mildness of the climate, 
the beauty of the country, and the abundance of its resources 
far excelled expectations ; and such glowing reports came back 
to the rocky farms of Windham County, that emigration raged 
for a time like an epidemic and seemed likely to sweep away 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 113 

a great part of the population." ' Hitherto the Connecticut 
government had done nothing to promote the Susquehanna 
and Delaware schemes, but commended the first to the good 
graces of the king. Even in 1771 Governor Trumbull, on 
being interrogated by the authorities at Philadelphia, wrote 
that the persons engaged therein had no order or direction 
from him, or from the General Assembly for their proceed- 
ings, and that the Assembly, he was confident, would " never 
countenance any violent, much less hostile, measures in vin- 
dicating the rights which the Susquehanna Company sup- 
posed they had to lands in that part of the country within 
the limits of the charter of their colony." As the State 
did not recognize them, and as they could not get on with- 
out government, the colonists proceeded to organize a gov- 
ernment of their own after the purest democratic model. 
Townships, settlements, fortifications, taxes, civil and criminal 
legal processes, and a militia were provided for. But the 
colony had taken too strong a hold of Connecticut for the 
government to disown it, even if the charter-claim to the 
country had been much weaker than it was. So the General 
Court resolved, in 1773, " That this Assembly, at this time, 
will assist, and in some proper way support their claim to 
those lands contained within the limits and boundaries of 
their charter which are westward of the province of New 
York." Commissioners were sent to Philadelphia to arrange 
matters with the Penns, if possible, but they returned empty- 
handed. So the Assembly, in 1774, erected the territory from 
the Delaware to a line fifteen miles west of the Susquehanna, 
into the town of Westmoreland, attaching it to Litchfield 
County, Connecticut ; and two years later it organized the 
same territory into the County of Westmoreland. The extem- 
porized government of the settlers now gave place to the 
government set up by the mother colony. Thus the colonists 
and Connecticut carried things with a strong hand down to 

' Miss Larned : History of Windham County, II., 49-51. 



114 THK OLD NORTHWEST. 

the Revolution, when the population numbered three thou- 
sand. How great the promise was for a new Connecticut in 
Northern Pennsylvania, a Connecticut writer shall tell. 

" Connecticut laws and taxes were enforced regularly ; Con- 
necticut courts alone were in session ; and the levies from the 
district formed the Twenty-fourth Connecticut Regiment in the 
Continental armies. The sordid, grasping, long-leasing policy 
of the Penns had never been able to stand a moment before the 
oncoming wave of Connecticut democracy, with its individual 
land ownership, its liberal local government, and the personal 
incentive offered to individuals by its town system. So far as 
the Penns were concerned, the Connecticut town system siin- 
ply swept over them, and hardly thought of them as it went. 
But for the Revolution, the check occasioned by the massacre, 
and the appearance of a popular government in place of the 
Penns, nothing could have prevented the establishment of Con- 
necticut's authority over all the regions embraced in her West- 
ern claims." ' 

But the Penns were not idle. In 1761 they obtained from 
Attorney-General Pratt, afterward Lord Camden, an opinion 
that firmly supported their cause. Connecticut, too, sought 
unto men learned in the law. She obtained from Lord 
Thurlow, Wedderburn, afterward Lord Loughborough, Chan- 
cellor Dunning, and Mr. Jackson the counsel that she 
wanted. The Penns determined at last to resort to that argu- 
ment which their great ancestor had so much deprecated. In 
1772 one Colonel Plunkett, under orders from the government, 
destroyed some Connecticut settlements on the west bank of 
the Susquehanna; and late in 1775, with a strong force, he 
attempted to drive the settlers out of the Wyoming Valley, 
but was repulsed. At this point the Continental Congress 
broke in upon the dispute, in the name of the common cause 
against the mother country, with a "whereas" that the quar- 



Johnston : Connecticut, 278. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. II5 

rel, if continued, would be productive of consequences very- 
prejudicial to the common interest of the Colonies, and with 
an urgent recommendation "that the contending parties im- 
mediately cease all hostilities, and avoid every appearance of 
force, until the dispute can be legally decided."^ Thus 
ended the second " Pennamite and Yankee War." 

The Westmorelanders stood as an outpost in the war 
against Great Britain, and in 1778, when nearly all the able- 
bodied men were absent in the army, two savages, Butler the 
Tory and Brandt the Indian, wrought at Wyoming a deed of 
blood that, wherever told during a hundred years, has never 
failed to move horror and pity. The men, women, and chil- 
dren who then fell at the hands of the enemy, or perished 
miserably in the wilderness from hunger, disease, or fatigue, 
were not Pennsylvanians. The Gertrudes of Wyoming were 
all Connecticut girls. The massacre materially strengthened 
Pennsylvania's case : a Westmoreland containing thousands 
of thriving people was one thing ; a Westmoreland that was 
waste and desolate, quite another. 

The parties had submitted the dispute to the King in Coun- 
cil, but the war rendered the appeal to that fountain of jus- 
tice nugatory. Article IX. of the Confederation vested juris- 
diction over such disputes between States in Congress. So, 
as the war was now drawing to a close, Pennsylvania called 
upon that arbiter to decide between the contestants. A Fed- 
eral court was accordingly organized to try the issue ; and 
this court, at 1 cnton, December 30, 1782, after a full hear- 
ing, rendered the following decision : 

"We are unanimously of opinion tliat the State of Connect- 
icut has no right to the lands in controversy. 

"We are also unanimously of opinion that the jurisdiction 
and pre-emption of all the territory lying within the charter- 
boundary of Pennsylvania, and now claimed by the State of 
Connecticut, do of right belong to the State of Pennsylvania." ^ 

'Journals of Congress, I., 21 1. '^ Ibid., IV., 140, 



Il6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Ten or more years after the trial, it became known that the 
court agreed beforehand " that the reasons for the determi- 
nation should never be given," and " that the minority should 
concede the determination as the unanimous opinion of the 
court." The lirst of the two rules suggests at once, what, in- 
deed, has always been understood to be true, that the court 
did not consider the points of law involved at all, but that 
the case, as lawyers say, " went off on State reasons." 

The Trenton decision, while final and conclusive as to the 
public corporate rights of Connecticut, in no way touched the 
land-owners, who, the war over, began to find their way back 
to their old homes. These were left to the justice or mercy of 
Pennsylvania ; and it is to be feared that the treatment they 
received sometimes made them think more kindly of Butler 
and of Brandt. The Trenton judges all commended the un- 
fortunate holders to the favorable consideration of the victor 
State, urging that they should be quieted in all their claims 
by an act of the Assembly, and that the right of soil, as de- 
rived from Connecticut, should be held sacred. There now 
ensued that generation of legislation and litigation, " Yankee 
claims," and " accommodation" and " intrusion " acts, of Ethan 
Allen and his Vermont methods, of plans to organize a new 
State and to force its recognition upon Pennsylvania and Con- 
gress, and reckless agitation which together make up the 
third " Pennamite and Yankee War." The " Accommodation 
Act," once repealed and then re-enacted, put an end to the 
strife. 

Had the court of 1782 decided this issue the other way, 
Connecticut could not permanently have retained the country ; 
a State of Westmoreland would have been the almost certain 
result. The conviction that one State within the present lim- 
its of Pennsylvania would be better than two was probably 
one of the State reasons that led the court to its conclusion. 
However, when the third "Pennamite and Yankee War" 
Avas in progress, and still more when it was over, Connecticut 
men flowed into the Northern belt of Pennsylvania, where 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. H7 

their presence is seen to-day in New England names, towns, 
and manners. 

The decision of 1782 was wider than the case submitted, 
applying as it did to the whole Connecticut claim within the 
charter-limits of Pennsylvania ; but Connecticut made no ob- 
jection on that score. Fortunately for her, Pennsylvania had 
a definite boundary on the west. Carrying her stake west- 
ward, she resolutely drove it into the ground five degrees west 
of the Delaware ; that is, she asserted her right to the strip of 
land lying between 41° and 42° 2' west of Pennsylvania to the 
Mississippi River, which, by the treaties of 1763 and 1783, 
had taken the place of the South Sea as the western boundary. 
In 1783 Governor Trumbull issued a proclamation forbidding 
all persons to settle on those lands without permission first 
obtained of the General Assembly. 

The good grace with which Connecticut submitted to the 
Trenton decision has excited the surprise of historians, who 
have cast about for the cause. Governor Hoyt supposes 
" that Connecticut had prearranged the case with Pennsylvania 
and Congress, and that out of the arrangement she was to get 
the Western Reserve," and refers for proof to a congressional 
report on finance, made a month after the decision, which 
says : " Virginia and Connecticut have also made cessions, the 
acceptance of which, for particular reasons, have been de- 
layed." ' Mr. Johnston also supposes " that Connecticut had 
reasons apart from the justice of the decision," and he finds 
them in the relation of the Western lands to the question of 
American nationality." The suggestion is ventured that if 
Connecticut was actuated by any reason other than deference 
to the authority of the Trenton tribunal, it was a desire to 
strengthen her position west of the Pennsylvania line. She 
would evidently be better able to deal with the new dispute 
if the old one was off her hands. 

The Pennsylvania construction of the charter of 1681 was 

' Brief of Title, etc., 46, 47. * Connecticut, 280, 281. 



IlS THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

wholly satisfactory to New York, when the time came for her 
to look after the country west of the Delaware. That con- 
struction saved her a dispute, and, possibly, a large extent of 
her present territory as well.' Commissioners appointed by 
the two colonies fixed the northeastern boundary of Penn- 
sylvania on an island in the Delaware in 1774; the line west 
of that point was surveyed in 1786-87, and ratified in 1789. 

The northern boundary of Connecticut is 42° 2', the south- 
ern boundary of New York 42° ; and the overlapping tract, 
called at the time "the Gore," led to a controversy between 
the two States. In 1795 Connecticut, for the consideration of 
$40,000, quit-claimed to Ward and Halsey all her right and 
title to the said strip of land. Those to whom they sold the 
lands found settlers with New York titles already in posses- 
sion. In 1796 suits were brought in the United States Cir- 
cuit Court to eject the New York claimants. Before the 
cases were heard, Connecticut wholly renounced her right and 
title to land or jurisdiction west of the line of 1733, which 
threw the suitors out of court. This act of renunciation led 
to long and bitter murmuring on the part of those holding 
the Ward and Halsey titles, which was finally quieted, partly 
by time and partly by a compensation voted from the State 
treasury. 

Massachusetts fared much better than Connecticut in main- 
taining her Western title. Her cession of 1785 to the nation 
will be treated in another place ; but here it is important to 
remark that that cession did not touch her contest with New 
York for the lands within her charter-limits west of the Dela- 
ware and east of the north and south cession-line. That 
issue was compromised in 1786. Massachusetts surrendered 
to New York all her claim to the jurisdiction over said tract ; 
and New York surrendered to Massachusetts all claim to the 
lands within the Massachusetts limits lying west of a line 



' Maps of the middle of the last century often bound Pennsylvania north by 
parallel 43°. 



THE THIRTEEN COLONIES. 1 19 

running from the eighty-second mile-post west of the north- 
east corner of Pennsylvania north to Sodus Bay in Lake On- 
tario. This tract, the southeast corner of which is a little 
southwest of Elmira, embraced several million acres of land, 
including the famous Genesee Valley. 

In June, 1788, Congress instructed the Geographer to run 
the meridian by which New York and Massachusetts had 
limited themselves on the west, and to ascertain the quantity 
of land in the triangular tract lying west of said meridian and 
north of parallel 42° north. This tract was sold to the State 
of Pennsylvania the same year. The act of Congress author- 
izing the President to issue the letters patent bears date, Janu- 
ary 3, 1792. 

Mr. H. G. Stevens writes : " Dear fussy old Richard 
Hakluyt, the most learned geographer of his age, but with 
certain crude and warped notions of the South Sea ' down the 
back of Florida,' which became worked into many of King 
James's and King Charles's charters, and the many grants that 
grew out of them, was the unconscious parent of many geo- 
graphical puzzles." ' Puzzles there are in abundance, whether 
Hakluyt was^the parent of them or not. The principal of 
these puzzles on the Atlantic slope we have sought to solve. 
In future chapters Vv'^e shall consider the similar ones found in 
the Northwest.^ 

i Narrative and Critical History of America, V., 180. 

- Sidney George Fisher: The Making of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1896, 
chap. X, gives a very satisfactory account of the Pennsylvania-Connecticut con- 
troversy. 



VIII. 

THE WESTERN LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH 
GOVERNMENT FROM 176^ TO 177^. 

The ink with which the Treaty of Paris was written was 
hardly dry when Great Britain took a very important step in 
the line of a new land-policy. Just how much this step meant 
at the time is a matter of dispute, but the consequences flow- 
ing from it were such as to mark it a distinct new departure. 

Previous to the war, England had virtually afifirmed the 
principle that the discoverer and occupant of a coast was en- 
titled to all the country back of it ; she had carried her colo- 
nial boundaries through the continent from sea to sea ; and^ 
as against France, had maintained the original chartered lim- 
its of her colonies. Moreover, the grant to tlie Ohio Com- 
pany in 1748 proves that she then had no thought of prevent- 
ing over-mountain settlements, or of limiting the expansion 
of the colonies in that direction. But now that France had 
retired from the field vanquished, England began to see 
things in new relations. In fact, the situation was materially 
changed. She was left in undisputed possession of the east- 
ern half of the Mississippi Valley. Canada and Florida were 
British dependencies, and governments must be provided for 
them. The Indians of the West were discontented and an- 
gry ; and, strange to say, at the very moment that they lost 
the support of France, they formed, under Pontiac, a wide- 
spread combination against the British power. Then the 
strength and resource that the colonies had shown in the 
war had both pleased and disturbed the Mother Country ; 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 121 

pleased her because they contributed materially to the defeat 
of France, and disturbed her because they portended a still 
larger growth of that spirit of independence which had already 
become somewhat embarrassing. The eagerness with which 
the Virginians and Pennsylvanians were preparing to enter 
the Ohio Valley in the years 1 748-1 754 told England what 
might be expected now that the whole country lay open to 
the Mississippi. The home government undertook to meet 
the occasion with the royal proclamation of October 7, 1763. 

After congratulating his subjects upon the great advantages 
that must accrue to their trade, manufactures, and navigation 
from the new acquisitions of territory. His Majesty proceeded 
to constitute four new governments, three of them on the 
continent and one in the West Indies. His new territories 
on the Gulf he divided into East Florida and West Florida, 
by the Appalachicola River ; separating them from his pos- 
sessions to the north by the thirty-first parallel from the 
Mississippi River to the Chattahoochee, by that stream to its 
confluence with the Flint, by a straight line drawn from this 
point to the source of the St. Marys, and then by the St. 
Marys to the Atlantic Ocean. The next year, in consequence 
of representations made to him that there were considerable 
settlements north of the thirty-first parallel which should be 
included in West Florida, he drew the northern boundary of 
that province through the mouth of the Yazoo. The terri- 
tory lying between the Altamaha and St. Marys Rivers, so 
long the subject of dispute between Spain and England, as 
well as between South Carolina and Georgia, was given to 
Georgia. It was the proclamation of 1763 that first defined 
what afterward became the first southern boundary of the 
United States. As I shall have occasion to refer to them 
again, it will be well to give the boundaries of Quebec in the 
words of the royal proclamation. 

"The Government of Quebec, bounded on the Labrador 
coast by the River St. John [Saguenay], and from thence to a 



122 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

line drawn from the head of that river, through the Lake St. 
John, to the south end of the Lake Nipissim ; from whence 
the said line crossing the River St. Lawrence and the Lake 
Champlain, in forty-five degrees of north latitude, passes along 
the highlands which divide the rivers that empty themselves 
into the said River St. Lawrence, from those which fall into the 
sea ; and also along the north coast of the Bale des Chaleurs, 
and the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Rosieres, 
and from thence crossing the mouth of the River St. Lawrence 
by the west end of the Island of Anticosti, terminates at the 
aforesaid River St. John." ' 

The king gives directions for constituting the governments 
of the new provinces on 'the principle of representation. He 
also instructs the royal governors to grant lands to the officers 
and men who have served in the army and navy in the war, 
according to a prescribed schedule. 

It will be seen that the country west of the mountains, 
from parallel 31° to the lakes, was not embraced within the 
new governments. But this was not due to a sensitive regard 
for the chartered rights of the old colonies, as the following 
paragraph defining the new departure shows : 

" We do, therefore, with the advice of our privy council, 
declare it to be our royal will and pleasure, that no governor 
or commander-in-chief, in any of our Colonies of Quebec, East 
Florida, or West Florida, do presume, upon any pretense what- 
ever, to grant warrants of survey, or pass any patents for lands 
beyond the bounds of their respective governments, as de- 
scribed in their commissions ; as also that no governor or com- 
mander-in-chief of our other colonies or plantations in Amer- 
ica, do presume, for the present, and until our further pleasure 
be known, to grant warrants of survey or pass patents for any 
lands beyond the heads or sources of any of the rivers which 
fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or northwest ; or 
upon any lands whatever, which not having been ceded or pur- 
chased by us," etc. 



' The Annual Register, 1763. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. I23 

Just what was the meaning of this prohibition has been a 
matter of dispute from that day to this ; the opinions of the 
disputants depending, often at least, upon the relation of 
those opinions to other matters of interest. Solicitude for 
the Indians, and anxiety for the peace and safety of the colo- 
nies, are the reasons alleged in the proclamation itself. The 
*' whereas " introducing the proclamation says it is essential 
to the royal interest and the security of the colonies that the 
tribes of Indians living under the king's protection shall not 
be molested or disturbed in the possession of such parts of 
his dominions and territories as, not having been ceded to or 
purchased by him, are reserved to them as their hunting 
grounds ; and a declaration follows the prohibition that it is 
his royal will and pleasure, for the present, to reserve under 
his sovereign protection and dominion, for the use of the said 
Indians, all the lands within the new governments, within the 
limits of the Hudson Bay Company and beyond the sources 
of the rivers falling into the sea from the west and north- 
west. The king strictly forbids his loving subjects making 
any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession 
of any of the lands described, without his special leave and 
license; and he further enjoins all persons who have seated 
themselves upon any of the lands so reserved to the Indians, 
forthwith to abandon them. If at any time the Indians are 
inclined to dispose of their lands, they shall be purchased 
only in the king's name, by the governor or commander-in- 
chief of the colony within which the lands lie. The procla- 
mation winds up with some wholesome regulations respecting 
the Indian trade. 

No doubt a desire to conciliate the Indians was one of the 
motives that led to the prohibition of 1763. But was it the 
only motive ? Was it also the royal intention permanently to 
sever the lands beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into 
the Atlantic from the old colonies within whose charter-lim- 
its they lay ? and, when the time should come, to cut them 
up into new and independent governments ? 



124 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" The Annual Register " for 1763 says many reasons may 
be assigned for the prohibition. It states the necessity of 
quieting the Indians, and then presents the desirability of 
limiting the "from sea to sea" boundaries. 

"Another reason, we suppose, why no disposition has been 
made of the inland country, was, that the charters of many of 
our old colonies give them, with very few exceptions, no other 
bounds to the westward but the South Sea ; and consequently 
these grants comprehended almost everything we have con- 
quered. These charters were given when this continent was 
little known and little valued. They were then scarce ac- 
quainted with any other limits than the limits of America it- 
self ; and they were prodigal of what they considered as of no 
great importance. The colonies settled under royal govern- 
ment have, generally, been laid out much in the same manner ; 
and though the difficulties which arise on this quarter are not 
so great as in the former, they are yet sufficiently embarrassing. 
Nothing can be more inconvenient, or can be attended with 
more absurd consequences, than to admit the execution of the 
powers in those grants and distributions of territory in all their 
extent. But where the western boundary of each colony ought 
to be settled, is a matter which must admit of great dispute, and 
can, to all appearance, only be finally adjusted by the interpo- 
sition of Parliament." ' 

Obviously, Edmund Burke, or whoever wrote the " Recfis- 
ters review for that year, thought the prohibition meant 
something more than simply to guard the rights of the Ind- 
ians. Washington, on the other hand, wrote his Western 
land-agent, Colonel Crawford' in 1767: "I can never look 
upon that proclamation in any other light (but this I say be- 
tween ourselves) than a temporary expedient to quiet the 
minds of the Indians. It must fall, of course, in a few years, 
especially when those Indians consent to our occupying the 



^ The Annual Register, 1763, 20, 21. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 12$ 

lands." ' The authors of the Report on the Territorial Limits 
of the United States, made to Congress, January 8, 1782, ex- 
amined the proclamation very thoroughly, and came to the 
same conclusion that Washington had arrived at fifteen years 
before. They declare the king's object to have been " to keep 
the Indians in peace, not to relinquish the rights accruing 
under the charters, and especially that of pre-emption."^ Dr. 
Franklin held the same view, as we shall soon see. Mr. Ban- 
croft says the West " was shut against the emigrant from fear 
that colonies in so remote a region could not be held in de- 
pendence. England, by war, had conquered the West, and a 
ministry had come which dared not make use of the con- 
quest." ' No matter what the proclamation meant, it was a 
great disappointment to the colonies. " Wherein are we bet- 
ter off, as respects the Western country," they said in sub- 
stance, " than we were before the war ? " 

No man of his time more thoroughly comprehended the 
Western question than Dr. Franklin. Notices of his princi- 
pal writings on the subject will more clearly define that ques- 
tion, and throw much light on its shifting phases. 

Reference has already been made to the Plan of Union 
adopted by the Albany Congress in 1754, and to Franklin's 
exposition of the same. This " plan " placed the regulation 
of the Indian trade, the purchasing of Indian lands, and the 
planting of new colonics under the control of the Union. 
Franklin supported this part of the scheme with the obvious 
arguments. A single colony could not be expected to extend 
itself into the West ; but the Union might establish a new 
colony or two, greatly to the security of the frontiers, to in- 
crease of population and trade, and to breaking the French 
connections between Canada and Louisiana.^ The "from sea 
to sea " colonies must be suitably limited on the west. 

Soon after the Albany Congress, Franklin wrote his 

' Butterfield : Washington-Crawford Letters, 3. 

' Secret Journals of Congress, III., 154. ^ History, III., 32. 

* Sparks : Writings of Franklin, III., 32-55. 



126 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" Plan for Settling two Western Colonies in North America, 
with Reasons for the Plan." He says the country back of the 
Appalachian Mountains must become, perhaps in another cen- 
tury, a populous and powerful dominion, and a great accession 
of power to either England or France. If the English delay 
to settle that country, great inconveniences and mischiefs will 
arise. Confined to the region between the sea and the moun- 
tains, they cannot much more increase in numbers owing to 
lack of room and subsistence. The French will increase much 
more, and become a great people in the rear of the English. 
He therefore recommends that the English take immediate pos- 
session of the country, and proceed at once to plant two strong 
colonies, one on the Ohio and one on Lake Erie. The new 
colonies will soon be full of people ; they will prevent the dis- 
asters sure to follow if the French are allowed to have their 
way in the West ; the Ohio country will be a good base for op- 
erations against Canada and Louisiana in case of war; and the 
colonies will promote the increase of Englishmen, of English 
trade, and of English power. Franklin again assumes that 
the " from sea to sea" charters are still in force, and argues that 
they must be limited by the Western mountains. The tract 
closes with a plea for urgency.' War with the French had 
now begun, and new colonies were necessarily postponed until 
the sword should decide the destiny of the West ; but Frank- 
lin still kept the subject in mind. Li 1756 he wrote to Rev. 
George Whitfield : 

" I sometimes wish that you and I were jointly employed by 
the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio. I imagine that we 
could do it effectually, and without putting the nation to much 
expense ; but I fear we shall never be called upon for such a 
service. What a glorious thing it would be to settle in that fine 
country a large, strong body of religious and industrious peo- 
ple ! What a security to the other colonies and advantage to 
Britain, by increasing her people, territory, strength, and coni- 

' Sparks : III., 69-77. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 12/ 

merce ! Might it not greatly facilitate the introduction of pure 
religion among the heathen, if we could, by such a colony, show 
them a better sample of Christians than they commonly see in 
our Indian traders ? — the most vicious and abandoned wretches 
of our nation." ' 

Immediately after Wolfe's victory in 1759, men on both 
sides of the ocean began to speculate upon the terms of the 
peace that they saw must soon come. It seemed inevitable 
that England would be able to dictate her own terms to her 
old enemy ; and the question arose, what territorial indemni- 
ties and securities she should exact. More specifically, the 
question arose whether Canada should be retained or return- 
ed to France in exchange for Guadaloupe. Two or three 
pamphlets discussing this question appeared in London. To 
one of them, that advocated the surrender of Canada, pub- 
lished without a name, but sometimes ascribed to Edmund 
Burke, Franklin wrote a reply that he entitled " The Interest 
of Great Britain Considered with Regard to the Colonies 
and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadaloupe," but that is 
commonly called " The Canada Pamphlet." A rapid review 
of this vigorous production will throw much light upon the 
state of opinion touching the West both in America and in 
Europe. 

Franklin holds, in opposition to his antagonist, that Eng- 
land might properly demand Canada as an indemnification, 
although she had not, in the outset, put forward such an 
acquisition as one of the objects of the war. He argues that 
the relations of England and France in America are such as 
to prevent a lasting peace, declaring that such a peace can 
come only when the whole country is subject to the English 
government. Disputes arising in America will be the occa- 
sion of European wars. Wars between the two powers origi- 
nating in Europe will extend to America, and give oppor- 

' Bigelow : Works of Franklin, II., 467. 



128 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tunities for other powers to interfere. The boundaries be- 
tween the English and French in North America cannot be 
so drawn as to prevent quarrels. The frontier must neces- 
sarily be more than fifteen hundred miles in length. Happy 
was it for both Holland and England that the Dutch, in 1674, 
ceded New Netherlands to the English ; since that time 
peace between them has continued unbroken, which would 
have been impossible if the Dutch had continued to hold 
that province, separating, as it does, the eastern and middle 
British colonies. 

Franklin next contends that erecting forts in the back set- 
tlements will not prove a suf^cient security against the French 
and Indians, but that the retention of Canada implies every 
security. The possession of that province, and that alone, 
can give the English colonies in America peace. 

He then devotes several pages to the proposition that the 
blood and treasure spent in the war were not spent in the 
cause of the colonies alone. This is in reply to the argument 
that the interests at stake in America were rather colonial than 
British or imperial. The retention of Canada will widen the 
landed opportunities of the colonists, and will tend to keep 
them agricultural and to prevent manufactures. Franklin 
then enunciates a proposition that would make Pennsylvania 
economists of to-day stare and gasp. " Manufactures are 
founded in poverty. It is the multitude of poor without land 
in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or 
starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, 
and afford it cheap enough to prevent the importation of the 
same kind from abroad, and to bear the expense of its own 
exportation." He contends that the North American colo- 
nies are the western frontier of the British Empire ; that they 
must be defended by the empire for that reason, and that 
Canada will be a conquest for the whole, the advantage of 
which will come in increase of trade and ease of taxes. 

To the argument that the colon'ies are large and numer- 
ous enough, and that the French ouWht to be left in North 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 129 

America to keep them in check, Franklin replies that, in time 
of peace, the colonists double by natural generation once in 
twenty-five years, and that they will probably continue to do 
so for a century to come ; but that the colonies will not cease 
to be useful to the Mother Country for that reason. On this 
point he accumulates a variety of information relating to the 
industrial and commercial possibilities of the country east of 
the Mississippi River that is as interesting as curious. One 
hundred millions of people can subsist in the agricultural con- 
dition east of that river and south of the Lakes and the St. 
Lawrence. The facilities for inland navigation are dwelt 
upon with admiration. Franklin dwells at much length upon 
the improbability of the colonists taking up manufactures, and 
upon the vast quantities of British goods that they will be 
sure to buy and consume. 

Having striven at such length to prove that the colonies 
will not be useless to the Mother Country, he takes up the 
proposition that they will not be dangerous to her. This is 
the most delicate subject handled in the whole pamphlet, 
and one that attracted attention before the war began. Kalm, 
the Swedish naturalist who visited the colonies in 1748, and 
who saw so much more than natural objects in the course of 
his travels, reports that in New York he found much doubt 
whether the King of England, if he had the power, would 
wish to drive the French out of Canada. Kalm thus expresses 
his own opinion: "As this whole country is toward the sea 
unguarded, and on the frontier is kept uneasy by the French, 
these dangerous neighbors are the reason why the love of 
these colonies for their metropolis does not utterly decline. 
The English Government has, therefore, reason to regard the 
French in North America as the chief power that urges their 
colonies to submission." ' It is well known that Choiseul 
warned Stanley when the two ministers were discussing the 
treaty of 1763, that the English colonies in America " would 

'Bancroft: History, II., 310-311. 



I30 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

not fail to shake off their dependence the moment Canada 
should be ceded." ' This feeling was shared by many people 
in England, and it probably influenced those who said " Gua- 
daloupe not Canada " quite as much as the superiority of the 
Guadaloupe sugar to the Canada furs. Such is a fair state- 
ment of the argument that Franklin sets himself to answer. 

His reply is " that the colonies cannot be dangerous to 
England without union, and that union is impossible." To 
prove that union is impossible, he sets forth the jealousies of 
the colonies and the failure of all attempts hitherto made to 
bring them to act together. There are now fourteen sepa- 
rate governments on the sea-coast, and there will probably 
be as many more behind them on the inland side. These 
have different governors, different laws, different forms of 
government, different interests, different religious persuasions, 
and different manners. " If they could not agree to unite for 
their defence against the French and Indians, who were per- 
petually harassing their settlements, burning their villages, and 
murdering their people, can it reasonably be supposed there 
is any danger of their uniting against their own nation, which 
protects and encourages them, with which they have so many 
connections and ties of blood, interest, and affection, and 
which, it is well known, they all love much more than they 
love one another?" And yet Franklin was careful to leave 
an open door through which he could have escaped the charge 
of inconsistency, if such charge had been preferred a dozen 
years later. "When I say such a union is impossible, I mean 
without the most grievous tyranny and oppression." " The 
waves do not rise," he says, " but when the winds blow." 
What such an administration as the Duke of Alva's might 
bring about he does not know ; but he has a right to deem 
that impossible. Under this head he answers the argument 
"that the remoteness of the Western territories will bring 
about their separation from the Mother Country." " While our 



' Parkman : Montcalm and Wolfe, II., 403. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 13 1 

Strength at sea continues, the banks of the Ohio, in point of 
easy and expeditious conveyance of troops, are nearer to Lon- 
don than the remote parts of France and Spain to their re- 
spective capitals, and much nearer than Connaught and Ulster 
were in the days of Queen Elizabeth." Of the two, the pres- 
ence of the French in Canada will engender disaffection in 
the colonies rather than prevent it. The only check on their 
growth that the French can possibly be, is that of blood and 
carnage. 

Franklin then argues that Canada can be easily peopled 
from the colonies without draining Great Britain of her in- 
habitants. Last of all comes the proposition that the value 
of Guadaloupe is much overestimated by those who prefer 
that island to Canada. 

Many of the arguments contained in this famous pamphlet 
would now be set aside by an economist as fallacious ; but, 
fallacious as they may be, they have that plain directness 
which, along with other qualities, rendered Franklin's political 
tracts so conclusive to the common mind. The pamphlet at- 
tracted great attention at the time, and "was believed," ac- 
cording to Dr. Sparks, " to have had great weight in the min- 
isterial councils, and to have been mainly instrumental in 
causing Canada to be held at the peace,"' 

In 1765, Sir William Johnson, Governor Franklin, and 
other influential persons formed a project for establishing a 
new colony in the Illinois country. They applied to Dr. 
Franklin, then in London, acting as agent for Pennsylvania, 
for assistance, and he entered warmly into the enterprise, in 
which he also had an interest. For a time the application for 
a grant of lands was regarded with much favor, but was fi- 
nally rejected. The Doctor's letters to his son, in the years 
1766-1768, report the progress of the negotiation, and help 
us to understand English opinion touching Western settle- 
ments. He found the following objections urged against 

' Sparks : IV., 1-53. 



132 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the plan: (i) The distance would render such a colony of 
little use to England, as the expense of the carriage of goods 
would urge the people to manufacture for themselves ; (2) 
the distance would also render it difficult to defend and gov- 
ern the colony ; (3) such a colony might, in time, become 
troublesome and prejudicial to the British Government ; (4) 
there were no people to spare, either in England or the other 
colonics, to settle a new colony. Lord Hillsborough was ter- 
ribly afraid of " dispeopling Ireland." To overturn these ob- 
jections, Franklin brought forward the arguments with which 
we are now familiar. Some London merchants, who were 
called upon for testimony, gave the unanimous opinion that 
colonies in the Illinois country and at Detroit would enlarge 
British commerce. Franklin " reckoned " that there would be 
63,000,000 acres of land in the proposed colony. He also 
reported an inclination on the part of ministers to abandon 
the Western posts as more expensive than useful, unless the 
colonies should see fit to keep them up at their own expense. 
Fort Pitt was actually abandoned soon after. 

Here I must interrupt the narrative concerning Franklin, 
to state some other facts material to the purpose. In 1768 
Stuart, the Southern Indian agent, following the proclamation 
of 1763, and the instructions of Lord Hillsborough, negotiated 
with the Cherokees, who had no claim whatever to lands on 
the south side of the Ohio, a treaty that was very obnoxious 
to Virginia, since it limited her on the west by the Kanawha 
Riven A few days later Sir William Johnson, the Northern 
agent, negotiated with the Six Nations, who claimed the 
country to the Cumberland Mountains, a treaty that was 
much more to her liking. This treaty established the fol- 
lowing boundary-line between the lands that the Nations 
claimed in the West and the lands of the whites on the 
east": The Ohio and Alleghany Rivers from the m.outh of 
the Cherokee, as the Tennessee was then called, to Kittan- 



' Sparks : IV., 233-241. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 1 33 

ning, above Fort Pitt ; thence by a direct line east to the 
west branch of the Susquehanna ; thence through the moun- 
tains to the east branch, and on to the Delaware ; and finally 
by the Delaware, the Tianaderher, and Canada Creek to Wood 
Creek, above Fort Stanwix. While this line left nearly one- 
half of the State of New York in the hands of the Six Na- 
tions, it gave to the colonies the whole southeastern half of 
the Ohio Valley to the Tennessee. This line itself shows that 
the Nations regarded their Western possessions but lightly. 
It should be observed, also, that the alienation of their claim 
still left the English to deal with the Indians actually on the 
Western soil. In the end, this boundary came very near giv- 
ing Virginia a still closer limitation on the west than the one 
drawn by Stuart, as will soon appear. The opening up of the 
country south of the Ohio to settlement was followed by great 
land-speculations, and by quickened emigration to that region. 
In 1769 the proposition to establish a Western colony was 
revived, but in a new form. Thomas Walpole, Samuel Whar- 
ton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Pownal, and others peti- 
tioned the king for the right to purchase 2,400,000 acres of 
land on the south side of the Ohio River, on which to found 
a new government. After the delays incident to such busi- 
ness, this petition was granted by the King in Council in 
1772. Slow progress was made in perfecting the details; but 
the price of the land was finally fixed, the plan of government 
agreed upon, and the patent actually made ready for the seals, 
when the Revolution broke out, and dashed the new colony 
forever. Walpole, the leading promoter of the scheme, was 
an eminent London banker, and the company and grant were 
commonly called by his name. The company called itself 
the Grand Company, and proposed to name the colony 
Vandalia. Although the project finally failed, its history 
presents some exceedingly interesting features. It should be 
observed that the Ohio Company of 1748, which had been 
kept alive thus far, although thwarted in its original purposes 
by the war, was absorbed in this new scheme. 



134 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

In May, 1770, the Privy Council referred the Walpole pe- 
tition to the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations; 
and two years later their Lordships made an elaborate report, 
drawn by their president, Lord Hillsborough. This report ob- 
jected to the petition, that the tract of land prayed for lay partly 
within the dominion of Virginia south of the Ohio ; that it 
extended several degrees of longitude westward from the 
mountains ; and that a considerable part of it was beyond the 
line that had been drawn between His Majesty's territories 
and the hunting grounds of the Six Nations and the Chero- 
kees. Besides, to grant the petition would be to abandon 
the principle adopted by the Board of Trade, and approved 
by His Majesty at the close of the war. "Confining the 
Western extent of settlements to such a distance from the 
sea-coast as that those settlements should lie within the reach 
of the trade and commerce of this Kingdom, upon which the 
strength and riches of it depend," and also within the exercise 
of that authority and jurisdiction which were conceived to be 
necessary for the preservation of the colonies in due subor- 
dination to, and dependence upon, the Mother Country — are 
declared the " two capital objects " of the proclamation of 
1763. Lord Hillsborough, indeed, admits that the line agreed 
upon at Fort Stanwix in 1768 is, in the southwest, far be- 
yond the sources of the rivers that flow into the Atlantic ; 
but since this Stanwix line still further restricts the Indians' 
hunting grounds, he sees in this fact a new reason for adher- 
ing closely to the restrictive policy. His Lordship declares 
the proposition to form inland colonies in America " entirely 
new ; " he says the great object of the North American colo- 
nies is to improve and extend the commerce, navigation, and 
manufactures of England ; shore colonies he approves be- 
cause they fulfil this condition, and inland colonies he con- 
demns because they will not fulfil it. To the argument that 
settlers are flowing westward, and that Western settlements 
are inevitable, Lord Hillsborough replies that His Majesty 
should take every method to check the progress of such set- 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 135 

tlements, and should not make grants of land that would have 
an immediate tendency to encourage them. The report closes 
with a recommendation that the Crown immediately issue a 
new proclamation forbidding all persons taking up or settling 
on lands west of the line of 1763. 

It would be hard to say whether this report won for its 
author the wider fame by reason of its odious application of 
the doctrines of the colonial system to the question of West- 
ern settlements, or by reason of the crushing reply that it 
called out from Dr. Franklin. Before taking up that reply, 
however, the remark is pertinent that Lord Hillsborough's 
notion that royal proclamations were going to keep the ad- 
venturous people of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas 
out of the Western country, is one of a multitude of proofs of 
the incapacity of the British mind, at that time, to under- 
stand American questions. It was only less absurd than 
Dean Tucker's famous plan for guarding the frontier against 
the incursions of the Indians, viz., that the trees and bushes 
be cut away from a strip of land a mile in breadth along the 
back of the colonies from Maine to Georgia.' 

Franklin begins his reply with correcting the noble Lord's 
ideas of American geography. The land asked for lies be- 
tween the Alleghany Mountains and the Ohio River, which 
are separated, " on a medium," by not more than a degree 
and a half. The grant will not be an invasion of the domin- 
ion of Virginia, because that colony is bounded on the west 
by the mountains. The country west of the Alleghanies was 
in the possession of the Indians previous to the Stanwix 
treaty, and since that time the king has not given it to Vir- 
ginia. To support the proposition that Virginia does not ex- 
tend beyond the mountains, which is absolutely essential to 
his argument, he draws up a territorial history of the region 
within which the grant will fall, entirely ignoring the Vir- 
ginia charter. 

' Sparks : Writings of Franklin, IIL, 48, 49. 



136 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

1. The country southward of the Great Kanawha, as far 
as the Tennessee River, originally belonged to the Shawanese 
Indians. 

2. The Six Nations, beginning about the year 1664, carried 
their victorious arms over the whole country, from the Great 
Lakes to the latitude of Carolina, and from the Alleghanies 
to the Mississippi. They, therefore, became possessed of the 
lands in question by right of conquest. 

3. Much stress is then laid on the English protectorate 
over the Six Nations, acknowledged by the French in 1713, 
and by the Nations in 1726. When the French came into 
Western Pennsylvania, in 1754, the English held them in- 
vaders on the express ground that the country belonged to 
their allies and dependents. This was the view held by the 
British court in discussing the subject with Paris in 1755. 
In the French and Indian war the English had simply main- 
tained their old rights ; they expelled the French from the 
West as intruders, and held the country not by conquest, but 
by the Iroquois title. At Fort Stanwix the Iroquois sold to 
the Crown all their lands south of the Ohio, as far down as 
the Tennessee. The Crown is, therefore, vested with the un- 
doubted right and property of those lands, and can do what 
it pleases with them. 

4. The Cherokees never resided or hunted in the country 
between the Kanawha and the Tennessee, and had no right 
to it. The claim that this region ever belonged to the 
Cherokees is a fiction altogether new and indefensible, in- 
vented in the interest of Virginia. When that government 
saw that it was likely to be confined on the west by the 
mountains in consequence of the Stanwix purchase, it set up 
the Cherokee title in opposition to the Northern Indians. 

5. Nor do the Six Nations, the Shawanese, or the Dela- 
wares now reside or hunt in the region where the grant will 
fall. 

Franklin's object is to find room for the new colony be- 
tween the Alleghanies and the Ohio. He follows closely the 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 137 

facts of history touching the matter immediately in hand. 
The Iroquois had pretended to own the whole West north 
of the Cumberland Mountains, and the British government 
and New York had humored them in that pretension. But 
Franklin's reasoning on this point recalls forcibly what Mr. 
Parkman says in a passage already quoted concerning Iroquois 
conquests and titles. What is more, the Iroquois never occu- 
pied the Ohio Valley, while the Indians who were occupying 
it did not acknowledge the Iroquois title. The signers to the 
Stanwix treaty were all Iroquois, the Delaware and Shawa- 
nese delegates present at the council refusing, or at least neg- 
lecting, to sign. But granting that the British-Iroquois title 
was perfectly good as against the French and Western Indians, 
it had no force as against Virginia. The right that priority 
of discovery gave the discoverer was the right of pre-emption, 
and the fact that the Indian title to the Ohio Valley was ac- 
quired long after the Virginia charters in no way affected the 
rights of Virginia, if she ever had any. If the English had 
waited to acquire Indian titles before sending over colonies, 
America would be a wilderness at this day. Even the hu- 
mane Penn first sent over his colony, two thousand strong, 
and then treated with the Indians. Franklin had himself, in 
1754, expressly acknowledged the binding force of the "from 
sea-to-sea" charters until they should be duly limited. It is 
hard to see, therefore, that the Fort Stanwix purchase af- 
fected Virginia's rights, unless it be claimed that the purchase 
was made by a royal oflficer at the expense of the Crown, and 
not by the colony at her own expense ; but it must be re- 
membered that the Crown had taken Indian affairs out of 
the hands of the colonies, and that New York, Massachusetts, 
and Connecticut never regarded the purchase as at all easing 
their rights in the West. At the same time, Franklin's rea- 
soning was admirably adapted to his immediate purpose. It 
would appear, from Franklin's account of things, that Virginia 
had concluded that after all she had more to fear from John- 
son's line than from Stuart's. 



138 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Franklin restates the old arguments in favor of interior 
settlements, and, after a thorough examination of the whole 
subject, comes to the conclusion that the proclamation of 
1763 was intended solely to pacify the Indians at a critical 
time, and that the Stanwix treaty has set the proclamation- 
line effectually aside. Looking into the West, he reports that 
in the years 1 765-1 768 great numbers of the king's subjects 
from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were settling over 
the mountains ; that this emigration led to great irritation 
among the Indians ; that the emigrants refused to obey the 
proclamations issued ordering them to return to the other 
side of the king's line ; that attempts to remove them by force 
ended only in failure ; that the frontier troubles were among 
the causes that led to the treaty of 1768 ; that the said treaty, 
negotiated by Sir William Johnson under express orders from 
the home government, proves that the permanent exclusion 
of settlers from the Western country could not have been in- 
tended in 1763. The Doctor states that Pennsylvania had 
made it felony to occupy Indian lands within the limits of 
that colony; that the Governor of Virginia had commanded 
settlers to vacate all Indian lands within the limits of his gov- 
ernment ; and that General Gage had twice sent soldiers to 
remove the settlers from the Monongahela region, but all 
these efforts to enforce the restrictive policy had proved un- 
availing. He asserts that the object of the Stanwix purchase 
was to avert "an Indian rupture, and give an opportunity to 
the king's subjects quietly and lawfully to settle thereon." 

Franklin does not fail to convict the Board of Trade of 
inconsistency. In 1748 it was anxious to promote settle- 
ments in the Ohio Valley ; in 1768 it was of the opinion that 
the inhabitants of the middle colonies should be permitted 
gradually to extend themselves backward; in 1770 Lord Hills- 
borough recommended a new colony there, and two years later 
he made to the council the adverse report to which Franklin 
is now replying. The promoters of the new colon}^ have no 
idea, he says, of draining Great Britain or the old colonies of 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 139 

their population. That will be wholly unnecessary. If the 
colony is planted the colonists will not become lawless or re- 
bellious, because they will be subjected to government ; but 
if the present restriction be continued the country will become 
the resort of desperate characters. Moreover, there is already 
a considerable population in the very district that the peti- 
tioners pray for ; and if these lawless people are not soon 
made subject to some authority, an Indian war will be the 
consequence. They are beyond the jurisdiction of Virginia, 
which cannot be extended over them without great difificulty, 
if at all. Hence, the only way to prevent the back country 
becoming the home of violence and disorder is to establish a 
new government there. 

Many pages of Franklin's paper are devoted to the eco- 
nomical bearings of the proposed colony. He does not deny 
the doctrines of the colonial system ; he rather assumes them ; 
but he contradicts Hillsborough's applications of those doc- 
trines to the matter in hand. On these points he collects a 
mass of information concerning the Ohio country and its ca- 
pabilities, its relations to the commercial world, methods of 
reaching it, etc., that makes the report exceedingly readable. 

Franklin's reply to Hillsborough, read in Council, July i, 
1772, immediately led to granting the Walpole petition. His 
Lordship, who had considered his report overwhelming, at 
once resigned his office in disgust and mortification. Hills- 
borough, it is said, " had conceived an idea, and was forming 
the plan of a boundary line to be drawn from the Hudson 
River to the Mississippi, and thereby confining the British col- 
onists between that line and the ocean, similar to the scheme 
of the French after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which brought 
on the war of 1756." The fact is, the British government 
had borrowed of the French their restrictive scheme.' 

It appears from Franklin's pamphlet that the Virginia gov- 



' The Hillsborough Report, Franklin's reply, and the proclamation of 1763 are 
in Sparks, IV., 302-380. 



140 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ernment had been disturbed by the proceedings at Fort Stan- 
wix. It was still more seriously disturbed by the proceedings 
of Walpole and his associates in London. On April 15, 1770, 
George Washington wrote a letter to Lord Botetourt, the 
governor, explaining how the Walpole grant would affect 
that colony. He says the boundary would run from the 
mouth of the Scioto River south through the pass of the 
Ouasioto Mountains near to the latitude of North Caro- 
lina ; thence northeast to the Kanawha at the junction of 
the New River and the Greenbrier; thence by the Green- 
brier and a due-east line drawn from the head of that river to 
the Alleghany Mountains ; after which the boundaries will 
be Lord Fairfax's line, the lines of Maryland and Pennsyl- 
vania, and the Ohio River to the place of beginning — a large 
surface, surely, over which to spread 2,400,000 acres of land. 
Washington says that many Virginians are already settled on 
New River and the Greenbrier upon lands that Virginia has 
patented. He declares that the grant will give a fatal blow to 
the interests of Virginia. Having thus delivered his " senti- 
ments as a member of the community at large," he begs leave to 
address his Excellency from " a more interested point of view," 
alleging that the 200,000 acres of land promised the Virginia 
troops called out in 1754 lie within these very limits. He 
protests earnestly against any interference with the rights of 
these men, and prays his Lordship's interposition with His 
Majesty to have these lands confirmed to the claimants and 
rightful owners. Washington continued to watch the new 
colony with a lively interest. In a letter to Lord Dunmore, 
vi^ritten June 15, 1771, he says the report gains ground that 
the grant will be made and the colony established, and de- 
clares again that the plan will essentially interfere with the 
interests and expectations of Virginia. He also renews his 
plea in behalf of the officers and soldiers of 1754.' 



' The two letters are found side by side in Sparks : Writings of Washington, 
II-. 355-361. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 141 

The facts presented show conclusively that in the years 
following the French war the Western policy of the British 
was not steady or consistent, but fitful and capricious ; 
prompted by a solicitude for the Indians that was partly 
feigned, and partly by a growing jealousy of the shore colo- 
nies. Vandalia was the more welcome to the Council because 
it would limit Virginia on the west, and so weaken her influ- 
ence. It is perfectly plain that George III. did not excel 
James I. in regard for the charter of 1609. 

The policy of restriction culminated in 1774 in the Quebec 
Act. This act guaranteed to the Catholic Church in the Prov- 
ince of Quebec the possession of its vast property, said to 
equal one-fourth of the old French grants ; it confirmed the 
Catholic clergy in the rights and privileges that they had en- 
joyed under the old regime ; it set aside the provisions of the 
proclamation of 1763, creating representative government, and 
restored the French system of laws ; it committed taxation to 
a council appointed by the Crown ; it abolished trial by jury 
in civil cases; and, finally, it extended the province on the 
north to Hudson Bay, and on the southwest and west to the 
Ohio and the Mississippi. Some features of this enactment 
can no doubt be successfully defended. As a whole it had two 
great ends. One was to propitiate the French population of 
Canada, to attach them by interest and sympathy to England, 
and so to prevent their making common cause with the colo- 
nies in case worse should come to worst ; the other was per- 
manently to sever the West from the shore colonies, and put 
it in train for being cut up, when the time should come, into 
independent governments that should have their afTfiliations 
with the St. Lawrence basin rather than with the Atlantic 
slope. Here it may be observed that twice the old North- 
west was subject to a jurisdiction whose capital was on the 
St. Lawrence ; once in the old French days, and once in the 
last year of the British control of the colonics — a fact that 
shows how thoroughly the home government had adopted 
French ideas concerning the West. 



142 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The year 1774 is remarkable for odious colonial measures; 
it was the year of the Boston Port Bill and the Massachusetts 
Bay Bill ; but no one of these measures was more odious to 
the colonists than the Quebec Act. They regarded the 
changes made in the government of Canada as a stroke at 
their own governments, while they looked upon the new 
boundaries as a final effort to wrest the West from them for- 
ever. The act provoked a general outcry of denunciation. 
The youthful Hamilton made it the subject of one of his 
first political papers. The Continental Congress, enumerating 
" the acts of pretended legislation " to which the king had 
given his assent, included in the formidable list the act " for 
abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring 
province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and 
enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example 
and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in 
these colonies." The Declaration of Independence arraigned 
the king on another charge. " He has endeavored to prevent 
the population of these States ; for that purpose obstructing 
the laws for the naturalization of foreigners ; refusing to pass 
others to encourage emigration hither, and raising the condi- 
tions of new appropriations of lands." The presence of these 
counts in the indictment of 1776 shows the power with which 
the royal policy had taken hold of the colonial mind. Those 
colonies that had definite Western boundaries joined in the 
indictment, as well as those that claimed to the Mississippi 
River. There was a universal feeling that " lands which had 
been rescued from the French by the united efforts of Great 
Britain and America were now severed from their natural 
connections with the settlements of the seaboard, and formed 
into a vast inland province like the ancient Louisiana." ' 

The enlargement of the province was defended in Parlia- 
ment, according to the " Annual Register," on the ground that 



' Adams : Maryland's Influence on Western Land Cessions to the United 
States, 19. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 143 

there were French inhabitants beyond the proclamation-limits 
of 1763 "who ought to have provision made for them; and 
that there was one entire colony at the Illinois." The " Reg- 
ister" thus sums up the objections of the opposition : 

" Further they asked, why the proclamation limits were en- 
larged, as if it were thought that this arbitrary government 
could not have too extensive an object. If there be, which they 
doubted, any spots on which some Canadians are settled, pro- 
vide, said they, for them ; but do not annex to Canada immense 
territories now desert, but which are the best part of that con- 
tinent, and which run on the back of all your ancient colonies. 
That this measure cannot fail to add to their other discontents 
and apprehensions, as they can attribute the extension given to 
an arbitrary military government, and to a people alien in ori- 
gin, laws, and religion, to nothing else but that design, of which 
they see but too many proofs already, of utterly extinguishing 
their liberties, and bringing them, by the arms of those very 
people, whom they had helped to conquer, into a state of the 
most abject vassalage." ' 

The restoration of the French system of laws was defended 
on the ground that the Canadians were indifferent to English 
institutions, and were incapable of carrying on representative 
government. 

But the Quebec Act did not accomplish its expected pur- 
pose. It was nullified by the Revolution. By and by, when 
the limits of the Thirteen Colonies, as they were after 1763, 
were set up as the criterion to determine the boundaries of 
the United States, England, France, and Spain, all took the 
position that the Royal Proclamation and the Quebec Act 
limited the States on the west. To this claim the replies, 
" The king's line of 1763 was a temporary expedient to quiet 
the Indians," and " The Quebec Act was one of the causes 
that brought on the war, and that we are fighting to resist," 



'Annual Register, 1774, 76, 77. 



144 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

are pressed once and again in the American state papers of 
the period. 

Even Lord Dunmore, that bitter enemy of the colonies 
and steadfast upholder of the British cause, ignored the 
Western policy of the home government. His personal char- 
acteristics, love of money and of power, contributed to this 
end. " His passion for land and fees," says Bancroft, " out- 
weighing the proclamation of the king and reiterated most 
positive instructions from the Secretary of State, he supported 
the claims of the colony to the West, and was a partner in 
two immense purchases of land from the Indians -in Southern 
Illinois. In 1773 his agents, the Bullets, made surveys at the 
Falls of the Ohio; and parts of Louisville and parts of the 
towns opposite Cincinnati are now held under his warrant." 
The Indian war that takes its name from his Lordship, which 
was brought on by his own Western policy, was in contraven- 
tion of the policy of the home government ; and the historian 
just quoted goes so far as to say : " The royal Governor of 
Virginia, and the Virginian Army in the Valley of the Scioto, 
nullified the Act of Parliament which extended the Province 
of Quebec to the Ohio, and in the name of the King of Great 
Britain triumphantly maintained for Virginia the Western and 
Northwestern jurisdiction which she claimed as her chartered 
right." Virginia " applauded Dunmore when he set at naught 
the Quebec Act, and kept possession of the government and 
right to grant lands on the Scioto, the Wabash, and the Illi- 
nois."' Dunmore's invasion of the Northwest, in 1774, added 
another link to the Virginia chain of titles to those regions. 
" From its second charter, the discoveries of its people, the au- 
thorized grants of its governors since 1746, the encouragement 
of its legislature to settlers in 1752-53, the promise of lands 
as bounties to officers and soldiers who served in the French 
war, and the continued emigration of its inhabitants, the An- 
cient Dominion derived its title to occupy the Great West." ' 

' History, IV., 82, 83, 88. = Bancroft : History, III., 320. 



LAND POLICY OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 145 

Strangely enough, the British Government strove to keep 
the Northwest a waste, years after having lost all control of it. 
The British commissioners at Ghent, in 1814, proposed as 
one of the first conditions of peace, " that the United States 
should conclude a peace with the Indian allies of Great Brit- 
ain, and that a species of neutral belt of Indian territory should 
be established between the dominions of the United States 
and Great Britain, so that these dominions should be nowhere 
conterminous, upon which belt or barrier neither power should 
be permitted to encroach even by purchase, and the bounda- 
ries of which should be settled in this treaty" [about to be 
negotiated] ; and Dr, Adams, one of those commissioners, 
answering the question what should be done with the one 
hundred thousand citizens of the United States already set- 
tled in Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois, replied that they must 
shift for themselves.* 

There was one English statesman, at least, at the period 
of the Revolution who saw the futility of all attempts to carry 
out the restrictive policy. In his famous " Speech on Con- 
ciliation of America," delivered in the House of Commons, 
March 22, 1775, Edmund Burke replied to the suggestion 
that, as a means of checking the too rapidly growing popula- 
tion, the Crown should make no further grants of land, thus 
Avorking an " avarice of desolation " and a " hoarding of a 
royal wilderness." If the grants are stopped, the people will 
occupy without grants, as they have already done in many 
places; if driven from one locality, they will remove to an- 
other, for in the back settlements they are little attached to 
particular situations. And then, launching out into one of 
those glowing descriptive passages for which his eloquence is 
so celebrated, the orator proceeds : 

" Already they have topped the Appalachian Mountains. 
From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one 
vast, rich level meadow : a square of five hundred miles. 

Morse : John Quincy Adams, in Statesmen Series, 78, 80. 
10 



146 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Over this they would wander without a possibility of re- 
straint ; they would change their manners with the habits of 
their life ; would hence soon forget a government by which 
they were disowned ; would become hordes of English Tar- 
tars, and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce 
and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and 
your counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of 
all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in 
no long time must be, the effect of attempting to forbid as a 
crime, and to suppress as an evil, the command and blessing 
of Providence, ' Increase and multiply.' Such would be the 
happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts 
that earth which God by an express charter has given to the 
children of men." 

Signally as England failed in the attempt to exclude civili- 
zation from the Great West, she did not abandon the attempt 
to apply the principles of the Royal Proclamation to the 
American wilderness. In discussinsf the Oregon Question 
with the United States in i8 18-1846, she stubbornly strove 
to prevent settlements on the waters of the Columbia, and to 
devote the shores of the distant Pacific to the purposes of the 
Hudson Bay Company. Fortunately she was again foiled by 
the power that had foiled her before — the enterprise and hardi- 
hood of the American pioneer.^ 

1 New light has recently been thrown upon the subject of this chapter and 
related topics. See the following publications: F.J. Turner: Western State 
Making in the Revolutionary Era, The American Historical Review, Vol. I., 
pp. 70-257 ; G. H. Alden : New Governments west of the Alleghanies before 
1780, Madison, Wis., 1897; Victor Coffin: The Province of Quebec and the 
Early American Revolution, Madison, Wis., 1896; also Winsor: The West- 
ern Movement ; and Roosevelt : The Winning of the West. Mr. Coffin contro- 
verts the view advanced above, that the year 1763 marks a turning point in 
British Western Policy. It seems plain, at least, that from this time on British, 
policy was fluctuating and inconsistent. 



IX. 

THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 

Mr. Bancroft says the French and Indian war was be- 
gun by England " for the acquisition of the Ohio Valley. 
She achieved this conquest, but not for herself. . . . Eng- 
land became not so much the possessor of the valley of the 
West as the trustee, commissioned to transfer it from the 
France of the Middle Ages to the free people who were mak- 
ing for humanity a new life in America." ' How unfit Eng- 
land was, in the days of George III., to be the possessor of 
the valley, is shown by the policy that she pursued from the 
close of the French war to the beginning of the Revolution. 
She was first anxious to secure possession of the Ohio, and 
then reluctant to see it put to any civilized use. Her restric- 
tive Western policy, as we have seen, was one of the causes 
leading to the War of Independence, and so leading to the loss 
of the whole West. 

Although a solitude, and because a solitude, the over- 
mountain country had more at stake in the Revolution than 
the Atlantic slope. On the slope, whatever the issue of 
the war, an Anglo-Saxon civilization, although it might be 
greatly stunted and impoverished, was assured ; but in the 
Western valleys such few seeds of civilization as had been 
planted were Galilean and not Saxon. Moreover, there were 
uncertainties and perils growing out of the relation of that 
country to the Franco-Spanish civilization of Louisiana. Be- 
tween 174S and 1783 the Western question presented three 

' History, II., 565. 



148 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

distinct phases. In 1 748-1 763 it was the supremacy of Eng- 
land or France in the West ; in 1 763-1 775 it was whether the 
country should belong to the red man or the white man ; and 
in 1 775- 1 783 it was whether it should form a part of the 
United States or of some foreign power. In general, this last 
question was settled by the " skirmishes of sentinels and out- 
posts " east of the mountains, as Lafayette called the Rev- 
olution. Still the Northwest appears in the Revolution in 
two or three aspects that must be presented. 

For a few years before the beginning of the French war 
the Western Indians had been disposed to listen to the Eng- 
lish envoys who visited them rather than to the French ; but 
the defeat of Braddock brought upon the English frontier- 
settlements all the scalping knives of the Western hordes. 
The Indians were really a part of the soil, like the trees and 
the buffalo, but France could not transfer them in 1763 with 
the same facility to their new masters. The savages under- 
stood perfectly that the English were far more dangerous to 
them than the French had been. The posting of garrisons in 
the Western forts Avould be likely to bring to their best hunt- 
ing grounds swarms of colonists greedy for lands. The offi- 
cers of the garrisons sent to the West reported the Indians 
sullen and angry. Pontiac was at that very time organizing 
his formidable conspiracy, the aim of which was to roll back 
the tide of English invasion. In the summer of 1763 the 
storm of war burst upon the wilderness-garrisons: Mackinaw, 
St. Joseph, Sandusky, Ouiatenon, Fort Miami, Presque Isle, 
Le Bceuf, and Venango fell into the hands of the savages ; 
and Fort Pitt and Detroit were beleaguered. But Boquet's 
brave march to the heart of Ohio and Gladwin's heroic de- 
fence of Detroit broke the power of the Ottawa chieftain, and 
the Indians were compelled to come to terms. And now 
began a process of mutual reconciliation. The royal procla- 
mation of 1763, the subsequent restriction of the Western 
population, the measurable adoption of French methods by 
the British officers, the growing conviction of the savage that 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 149 

the British Government and the colonies were not the same, 
and that his danger came from the latter — these causes, with 
the widening breach between the Mother Country and the 
colonies, gradually won the Indians over to the British side, 
and made them ready to accept the war-belt whenever the 
British commandant at Detroit should send it to them. It 
is a fact, and perhaps a curious one, that whenever the St. 
Lawrence Valley and the Atlantic Slope have been arrayed 
against each other in deadly strife, the Western Indians have 
sided with the former — in 1755, in 1775, and in 1812, 

In 1763 Sir William Johnson estimated the Western Ind- 
ians, exclusive of the Illinois, at 9,000 warriors,' and we may 
accept that as the number at the beginning of the Revolu- 
tion. Of these the large majority were already enemies of 
the Americans, fully prepared to do their part to wrap the 
long frontier from the Susquehanna to the Tennessee in 
flames and blood. Left to themselves, these savages would 
have been a formidable foe ; but with a base of supplies on 
the Detroit, with rallying points in the wilderness-forts, and 
with the constant stimulation and frequent leadership of Brit- 
ish officers, they were simply portentous. The American 
Revolution in its Northwestern aspect was a continuation of 
the French and Indian war, the old conflict renewed with 
some change of parties. The States find the savage power of 
the Northwest arrayed against them as before. France has 
dropped out and England has taken her place, succeeding to 
all her ideas — even that of employing the savage's tomahawk 
against her revolted colonies — and to all the advantages of 
the old French position. 

The proposition to employ the scalping knife called out 
from Lord Chatham one of his immortal bursts of eloquence. 
It was repugnant to the feelings of General Howe and Sir Guy 
Carleton ; but it was heartily approved by Governor Hamil- 
ton, at Detroit, who at once made ready to use all the re- 

' Walker : Michigan Pioneer Collections, III., 16. 



I50 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

sources that his position gave him, to bring upon the rear 
and flank of the States the only form of warfare known in 
those regions. He employed Elliot, McGee, and the Girty 
brothers. He subsidized the Indians. Time and again he 
sent to the tribes the war-belt, summoning them to bloody 
forays that he himself had planned. His acts Avill not be here 
recounted, nor will the history of this phase of the Revolu- 
tion be written; but it is due to Hamilton to say that his 
policy was seen at Wheeling, at Harrodsburg, at Boones- 
borough, at the Blue Licks, where the flower of Kentucky 
fell, as well as in a hundred attacks upon outlying stations 
and defenceless farms. 

The only other force that the British commander at De- 
troit could wield was that of the habitants. Before we can 
describe the part that they played in the struggle, we must 
sketch their history from the close of the previous war. 

The moment the French settlements in the West passed 
into English hands, they began to decline in both the number 
and the quality of their population. The causes of this de- 
cline are easily found. 

The sources of such strength as they had had were now 
sapped. The proclamation of 1763 left them outside the pale 
of any civil jurisdiction, subject only to military authority. 
Nor did the Quebec Act work any real change. All through 
the Revolution, the commander of the Detroit garrison was 
the civil as well as the military head of the whole Northwest, 
and most of his subordinates were military officers. There 
were magistrates, but their commissions came from the com- 
mandant, and they dealt out a very arbitrary and capricious 
justice. For example, Governor Hamilton adjudged a 
defendant, who pleaded that he could not pay a debt, to 
give the plaintiff an old negro wench ; and Dejean, a magis- 
trate who cuts a great figure in Detroit in those days, con- 
demned men to the gallows whom a jury had found guilty of 
theft. The orderly was a more conspicuous officer of the law 
than the constable. Military officers sometimes solemnized 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 151 

marriages, and even administered the rite of baptism. The 
Canadian officers of the time knew almost nothing of the 
country beyond the Lakes. Sir Guy Carleton, Governor of 
Canada, told the House of Commons in 1774 that Michigan 
was a part of Canada, but that Detroit was not ; and that he 
did not know where Canada ended and Illinois began. At 
that time, it must be remembered, English statesmen had less 
knowledge of the boundaries of great provinces in North 
America than they have now of narrow valleys or small oases 
in the deserts of Turkistan. Between the Western Jiabitants and 
the British officers there was a strong mutual dislike. They 
had been trained for generations to believe the British their 
implacable enemies, and they could not suddenly consent to 
be governed by them. To be sure, the capitulation of 1760 
and the treaty of 1763 both guaranteed them fullest pro- 
tection, with the full enjoyment of their religion ; but these 
pledges did not overcome their repugnance to the change 
of governors. Then most of them had sympathized with 
Pontiac, and this made them shy of the British authorities. 
The authorities of Louisiana offered the French in Illinois 
and Michigan special inducements to remove to that prov- 
ince. The mild climate, productive soil, a congenial popula- 
tion, and the French laws, religion, and customs, together with 
the more direct inducements, made the invitation very attrac- 
tive. The Illinois people had only to cross the Mississippi to 
find another Illinois, Then just at that time La Clede founded 
St. Louis. Very naturally, therefore, the Northwestern set- 
tlements began to diminish in numbers and to deteriorate in 
quality. In a few years Kaskaskia and Detroit dwindled 
to one-third their former population. Nor did a British pop- 
ulation come in to take their places. No doubt men from 
New York and other colonies would have fTocked to Detroit, 
had it not been for the adoption by the British Government 
of the French policy of restriction. Judge Walker says that 
in 1778 there were at Detroit thirty Scotchmen, fifteen Irish- 
men, and two Englishmen ; and he estimates the total per- 



152 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

manent population of the territory between the two rivers and 
the lakes as five thousand at the beginning of the Revolution.' 

Evidently this was not an inviting field in which to find 
recruits for the British service. 

In the fall of 1775 Lord Dunmore despatched his creature 
Dr. Connolly, who had just figured so prominently in the 
Western Pennsylvania troubles, to Detroit, with orders to 
raise a regiment of Canadians and a force of Indians with which 
to join his Lordship ; but Connolly's arrest and imprisonment 
in Maryland, and Dunmore's precipitate flight, nipped this en- 
terprise in the bud. The next year Captain de Langlade, of 
Green Bay, who had seen service in the French war, recruited 
a motley force of whites and Indians, mainly upon the upper 
waters, with which he descended to Montreal and joined the 
British army. 

It must not be supposed that the men of the frontier 
sat nerveless while the Indians were making their raids and 
the British of^ficers were seeking to array the French against 
them. Mention will not here be made of the minor invasions 
of the Indian country ; but one heroic movement, that was 
fraught with large consequences, must be treated somewhat 
at length. 

In the middle of the last century Virginia, owing to her 
position, her vast land-claims, and the stage of civilization 
which she had attained, had more Western enterprise than 
any other colony. In 1774 Dunmore's war gave her the 
" back-lands," into which her frontiersmen had been for some 
time pressing. Boone was a Carolinian, but Kentucky was a 
distinctively Virginia colony. In 1776 the Virginia legisla- 
ture erected the County of Kentucky, and the next year a 
Virginia judge dispensed justice at Harrodsburg. Soon the 
colony was represented in the legislature of the parent state. 
While thus extending her jurisdiction over the region south- 
west of the Ohio, the Old Dominion did not forget the lan- 

' Michigan Pioneer Collections, III., 12 et seq. 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 1 53 

guage of 1609, " up into the land throughout from sea to sea, 
west and northwest." 

George Rogers Clark, a Virginian who had made Ken- 
tucky his home, was endowed with something of the general's 
and statesman's grasp. While floating down the Ohio in 
1776, being then twenty-four years of age, he conceived the 
conquest of the country beyond the river. It does not appear 
that he saw the remote bearings of such an achievement ; at 
least, in his own account of it he says he was " elivated with 
the thoughts of the great service we should do our country in 
some measure puting an end to the Indian war on our fron- 
teers." ' But this was a great object. The savages scattered 
through the Northwestern wilderness were constantly attack- 
ing at one point or another the long thin line of frontier set- 
tlements ; and they drew their supplies of powder and lead 
and other necessaries, and often received leaders as well as 
direction, from the fortified forts, Detroit, Vincennes, and the 
rest. Accordingly, if the posts could be captured, the Indians 
would lose their rallying points and supplies, they would be 
overawed and restrained in a degree, and the war on the fron- 
tier would be put an end to " in some measure," if not alto- 
gether. Probably this was as far as Clark saw. But Thomas 
Jefferson saw much further. In a letter to Clark, the date of 
which is lost but that was written before the issue of the 
campaign was known in Virginia, that great statesman wrote: 
" Much solicitude will be felt for the result of your expedition 
to the Wabash ; it will at least delay their expedition to the 
frontier-settlement, and if successful have an important bear- 
ing ultimately in establishing our Northwestern boundary," * 

Clark says he had since the beginning of the war taken 
pains to make himself acquainted with the true situation of the 
Northwestern posts; and in 1777 he sent two young hunters to 
spy out the country more thoroughly, and especially to ascer- 
tain the sentiments of the habitants. On the return of these 

' Clark's Campaign in the Illinois, 24. - Ibid., 2, note. 



154 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

hunters with an encouraging report, he went to Williamsburg, 
then the capital of Virginia, where he enlisted Governor Pat- 
rick Henry and other leading minds in a secret expedition to 
the Illinois. Acting under a vaguely worded law, authorizing 
him to aid "any expedition against their Western enemies," 
Governor Henry gave Clark some vague public instruc- 
tions, directing him to enlist, in any county of the common- 
wealth, seven companies of men who should act under his 
command as a militia, and also private instructions that were 
much more full and definite. He is to attack the post of Kas- 
kaskia, but this he is to confide to as few as possible. If the 
white inhabitants of the post " will give undoubted evidence 
of their attachment to this State (for it is certain they live 
within its limits)," says the governor, they shall be treated as 
fellow-citizens; but if not, they must feel the miseries of war. 
He remarks that it is in contemplation to establish a post near 
the mouth of the Ohio. Boats, provisions, powder, and lead, 
will be provided at Fort Pitt. Both the public and private 
instructions are dated January 2, 1778.' The governor also 
gave the young captain a small supply of money, 

Clark immediately recrossed the mountains, and began 
to recruit his command. The secrecy that he was obliged to 
maintain made his undertaking difficult in the extreme. He 
complains bitterly of the obstructions thrown in his way by 
"many leading men in the fronteer," which prevented the en- 
listment of as many men as had been contemplated, and also 
led to frequent desertions. Overcoming as best he could the 
difficulties that environed him, he collected his feeble com- 
mand at the Falls of the Ohio. On June 26, 1778, he began 
the descent of the river. Leaving the Ohio at Fort Massac, 
forty miles above its mouth, he began the march to Kaskas- 
kia. This fell into his hands, July 5th, and Cahokia soon 
after, both without the loss of a single life. Clark found few 
Englishmen in these villages, and the French, who were weary 



'Appendix to Clark's Campaign in the Illinois. 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 155 

of British rule, he had little difficulty in attaching to the 
American interest. Vincennes, soon after, surrendered to a 
mere proclamation, when there was not an American soldier 
within one hundred miles of the place. The ease with which 
this conquest was accomplished was largely due to the Kas- 
kaskia priest, Father Pierre Gibault, who entered into Clark's 
plans with the greatest warmth and energy.* 

" I now found myself," says Clark, " in possession of the 
whole, in a country where I found I could do more real ser- 
vice than I expected, which occasioned my situation to be 
the more disagreeable as I wanted men." ^ At no time had 
he had two hundred men in his command ; and now, the 
time for which they had enlisted having expired, and the im- 
mediate object of the expedition having been gained, they 
were anxious to return home. Although the Illinois and the 
Wabash had fallen almost without a blow, it was necessary 
that they should be held or all would be lost, no matter 
whether the situation was viewed with the eyes of George 
Rogers Clark or the eyes of Thomas Jefferson. Clark pre- 
vailed upon one hundred men to re-enlist for eight months ; 
he then filled up his companies with recruits from the vil- 
lages, and sent an urgent call to Virginia for re-enforcements. 

' The editor of Clark's Campaign in the Illinois quotes from Judge Law, 
Colonial History of Vincennes, the remark that to Gibault, "next to Clark and 
Vigo, the United States are indebted for the accession of the States comprised 
in what was the original Northwest Territory [more] than to any other man " — 
33. 34, note. 

In 1778, St. Louis was a young town fourteen years of age, and the Spanish 
as well as the French population were very friendly to the Americans. Colonel 
Francis Vigo was a St. Louis merchant who rendered Clark and the Ameri- 
can cause most valuable services. Among others, he cashed Clark's drafts for 
$12,000 on New Orleans, a large sum in the Mississippi Valley in the years 1778- 
1779, and thus enabled him to keep the field. Clark's drafts were protested; 
and the debt due Vigo was not paid until 1876, and then only after many hear- 
ings by Congressional committees and protracted litigation in the United States 
courts. See Tract 35 of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical 
Society, A Centennial Lawsuit, by Judge C. C. Baldwin. 

2 Clark's Campaign, 36. 



156 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The salutary influence of the invasion upon the Indians was 
felt at once ; it " began to spread among the nations even to 
the border of the lakes ; " and in five weeks Clark settled a 
peace with ten or twelve different tribes. With great ability 
Clark outwitted the English, counteracted their influence 
upon the savages, and kept " spies continually in and about 
Detroit for a considerable time." He even captured Ouiate- 
non, which stroke, he says, " completed our interest on the 
Wabash." 

And now Clark began really to feel the dififlculties of his 
situation. Destitute of money, poorly supplied, commanding 
a small and widely scattered force, he had to meet and cir- 
cumvent an active enemy who was determined to regain what 
he had lost. Governor Hamilton projected a grand campaign 
against the French towns that had been captured and the small 
force that held them. The feeble issue was the capture, in 
December, 1778, of Vincennes, which was occupied by but 
two Americans. Clark, who was in the Illinois at the time 
of this disaster, at once put his little force in motion for the 
Wabash, knowing, he says, that if he did not take Hamilton, 
Hamilton would take him; and, February 25, 1779, at the 
end of a march of two hundred and fifty miles, that ranks in 
peril and hardship with Arnold's winter march to Canada, he 
again captured the town, the fort, the governor, and his whole 
command. Hamilton was sent to Virginia a prisoner of war, 
where he was found guilty of treating American prisoners 
with cruelty, and of offering the Indians premiums for scalps, 
but none for prisoners. 

American statesmen and soldiers perfectly understood the 
importance of Detroit. Congress considered the feasibility 
of capturing it as early as April, 1776, and often returned to 
the subject thereafter. But nothing was done, or really at- 
tempted, in the early years of the war, for want of men, mu- 
nitions, and money. Washington gave the subject his earnest 
attention. In December, 1778, he considered it in connection 
with a grand invasion of Canada, then projected. In January, 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 1$? 

1779, when a Northwestern expedition, under General Mcin- 
tosh, was proposed, he said the best way to deal with the Ind- 
ians was to carry the war into their own country. In April of 
the same year he inquired of Colonel Broadhead the best time 
to attempt a march to Detroit, and suggested the winter, be- 
cause the British would not then be able to use their naval 
force on Lake Erie.' Naturally, Clark's achievement, since it 
made the reduction of the post seem more feasible, led to 
more serious consideration of the subject. Clark himself con- 
sidered his work only half done, and was very ambitious to 
lead an army through the wilderness to the gateway of the 
Northwest. More than once a force seemed almost on the 
point of starting. A joint Virginia and Continental expedi- 
tion was at one time contemplated. But the same causes 
that operated to defeat the earlier attempts continued to 
operate. Clark, who probably did not appreciate the differ- 
ence between seizing Detroit and seizing Kaskaskia, was com- 
pelled to abandon the enterprise, and Detroit remained in 
British hands at the end of the war, and, in fact, until 1796. 
" Detroit lost for a few hundred men," was his pathetic la- 
ment as he surrendered an enterprise that lay near his heart. 
Had he been able to achieve it, he would have won and 
held the whole Northwest. As it was he won and held 
the Illinois and the Wabash in the name of Virginia and 
of the United States. The bearing of this conquest on the 
question of Western boundaries will be considered in another 
place, but here it is pertinent to remark that the American 
Commissioners, in 1782, at Paris, could plead uti possidetis in 
reference to much of the country beyond the Ohio, for the 
flag of the Republic, raised over it by George Rogers Clark, 
had never been lowered. It would not be easy to find in our 
history a case of an officer accomplishing results that were so 
great and far-reaching with so small a force. Clark's later life 
is little to his credit, but it should not be forgotten that he 

' Sparks : Writings of Washington, VI., 120, 156, 225. 



158 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

rendered the American cause and civilization a very great ser- 
vice. 

All this time the British were not idle. War-party after 
war-party was sent against the American border. In 1780 a 
grand expedition was organized at Detroit and sent to Ken- 
tucky, under the command of Captain Bird. But it accom- 
plished nothing commensurate with its magnitude and cost. 
Great efforts were made to raise a white contingent, but they 
brought together only some eighty men. Judge Walker finds, 
among the bills for supplies furnished the British Indian De- 
partment, items that plainly reveal the character of Bird's 
command; viz., 476 dozen scalping-knives, 1,206 pounds of 
vermilion, 21,663 yards tinsel roll, 301 dozen looking-glasses, 
8,200 ear-bobs, etc. 

The Northwest had been won by a Virginia army, com- 
manded by a Virginia ofificer, put in the field at Virginia's ex- 
pense. Governor Henry had promptly announced the con- 
quest to the Virginia delegates in Congress. He spoke of 
Detroit as being "at present defended by so inconsiderable a 
garrison, and so scantily furnished with provisions, for which 
they must be still more distressed by the loss of supplies from 
the Illinois, that it might be reduced by any number of men 
above five hundred," and closed his interesting communi- 
cation with the words : " Were it possible to secure the St. 
Lawrence and prevent the English attempts up that river by 
seizing some post on it, peace with the Indians would seem 
to be secured." ' In the same letter he also expressed much 
gratification at the spirit in which Clark's command had been 
received by the French settlers. But before Patrick Henry 
wrote this letter Virginia had welded the last link in her 
chain of title to the country beyond the Ohio. In October, 
1778, her Legislature declared: "All the citizens of the com- 
monwealth of Virginia, who are actually settlers there, or 
who shall hereafter be settled on the west side of the Ohio, 



Tyler : Patrick Henry, 230, 231. 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. 159 

shall be included in the district of Kentucky, which shall be 
called Illinois County." Nor was this all. Soon after, Gov- 
ernor Henry appointed a lieutenant-commandant for the new 
county, with full instructions for carrying on the government.' 
The French settlements remained under Virginia jurisdiction 
until March, 1784. 

Attention should more particularly be drawn to the spirit 
in which the French settlers beyond the Ohio received the 
Americans. It is perfectly clear that had they actively taken 
the side of the British, Clark could never have done his work. 
The ancient antipathy to the British ; a desire to see the 
work of 1763 apparently undone, although it was only being 
perfected ; the French alliance of 1778, which made them 
think they were again opposing the old enemy — these, with 
the intelligent and spirited conduct of the Kaskaskia priest, 
decided the habitants of the Illinois and the Wabash. In 
the far North, where the straggling white men were more 
reckless, and at Detroit, the centre of British influence, the 
French were more favorably disposed to the British. But 
even at Detroit the British officers complained of the apathy 
of the Canadians, and the small number of volunteers en- 
rolled in the expeditions there organized confirms the com- 
plaints. It is not too much to say that, in the end, the set- 
tlements upon which the British so much relied proved a 
means of their destruction. 

In future chapters we shall have occasion to refer to these 
French settlements again. But this is the place to say that 
the welcome which they gave the Americans did not arrest 
their fate or retard their decline. The breath of Anglo-Amer- 
ican civilization seemed almost as fatal to them as to the Ind- 
ians themselves. Louisiana and the fur lands continued to 
draw away their strength ; and scarcely a trace of them can 
be found in Northwestern life to-day. Chainplain laid the 
foundation of the British Province of Quebec ; the State of 

' Edwards : History of Illinois, and Life of Ninian Edwards, 5, 7. 



l60 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Louisiana is the child of the French colony; but the habi- 
tants of the Northwest seem as effectually lost in the past as 
the Mound Builders. 

Although the French settlements did not become an ele- 
ment in the civilization of the Northwest, they will always re- 
main an attractive and, in many respects, a pleasing chapter of 
American history. The story of Northwestern discovery and 
exploration will long be drawn upon for examples of heroic 
endurance, high courage, and unyielding devotion. It will 
long point the moral that sound ideas and practical purposes 
are as essential to success as zeal and enthusiasm. The 
French colonies as much surpass the English in poetic ele- 
ments as the English surpass them in strength and perma- 
nence ; and the long procession of discoverers, explorers, 
priests, coiireiirs des bois, traders, voyagcurs, soldiers, and Jia- 
bitants, with its retinue of bedizened savages, will stir the 
hearts of those who respond to high qualities, and catch the 
attention of those who have an eye for the picturesque. 
French life was marked by a good humor, contentment, sim- 
plicity, freedom from cankering care and desire for acquisi- 
tion, hospitality, childlike faith, and sociability that make it 
very attractive. Cable has touched some of its phases in his 
Creole pictures. Longfellow idealizes some of its traits, as 
well as much of its scenery, in " Evangeline." The descrip- 
tions written by tourists and United States ofificers at the 
time of the Louisiana purchase are more prosaic, but still have 
many elements of charm. Detroit stood the shock of the 
American emigration better than any other of the Western 
posts ; and many of the striking features of the old French 
town remained until they were fixed in enduring colors. INIr. 
Bela Hubbard's chapters, entitled "French Habitants of the 
Detroit," are a series of delightful pictures of the "pipe-stem 
farms," the uncouth ploughs and carryalls, the pony-carts, the 
races, the apple-orchards, the cider-mills, the ancient pear-trees 
whose origin no one can explain, the quaint houses, the wind- 
mills, the jaunty costumes, the fishing, the language, religion, 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION. l6l 

manners, and recreations, and the voyageurs, with a few speci- 
mens of their songs. 

But while the French life has so thoroughly disappeared 
from the Old Northwest, some of its wilder aspects may still 
be seen far north in the Grea^^ Fur Land. The vojagcur, 
for example, has disappeared from the streams of Michi- 
gan and Wisconsin; but he still paddles his canoe on the 
rivers falling into Hudson Bay and on the affluents of the 
Mackenzie. His blood is more mixed, his language more 
corrupt, and he is more a savage than one hundred years ago ; 
but he still preserves the main features of the type. A 
traveller who has visited those haunts describes him as merry, 
light-hearted, obliging, hospitable, and extravagant ; when 
idle, devoted to singing, dancing, gossip, and drinking to in- 
toxication ; having vanity as his besetting sin ; intensely su- 
perstitious ; completely under the influence of his priest ; de- 
voted to the forms of religion, grossly immoral, often dishon- 
est, and generally untrustworthy ; with no sense of duty in 
his daily life ; controlled by passion and caprice, and having 
little aptitude for continuous labor. " No man will labor more 
cheerfully and gallantly at the severe toil pertinent to his call- 
ing ; but those efforts are of short duration, and when they are 
ended, his chief desire is to do nothing but eat, drink, smoke, 
and be merry — all of them acts in which he greatly excels." ^ 

1 Robinson : The Great Fur Land, io8, 109. 

The close of the war left the Northwest in the hands of Great Britain, the 
Southwest in the hands of Spain. The first of these topics has been treated by 
Professor A. C. McLaughlin : The Western Posts and the British Debts, Annual 
Report of the American Historical Association, 1894, p. 419; the second topic, 
by B. A. Hinsdale, in The Establishment of the First Southern Boundary Line 
of the United States, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 

1893. P- 331- 

The Old Northwest in the Revolution maybe studied in \V. H. English: 
Concjuest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, 1778-1783, and a Life of 
George Rogers Clark, Indianapolis, 1896; Theodore Roosevelt: The Winning 
of the West, N. Y., 1889, Vol. II. ; W. F. Poole : The West, etc., in Narrative 
and Critical History of America, Vol. VI., chap. ix. ; Justin Winsor : The 
Westward Movement, chaps, viii-xii ; John Moses: Illinois, Historical and 
Statistical. Chicago, 1889, Vol. I. 



X. 

THE UNITED STATES WREST THE NORTH- 
WEST FROM ENGLAND. 

The Second Treaty of Paris. 

On the Fourth of July, 1776, the thirteen British colonies 
in North America, by their chosen representatives in general 
congress assembled, solemnly published and declared that 
they were, and of a right ought to be, free and independent 
States. By this act they assumed a separate and equal place 
among the powers of the earth as the United States of 
America. Less than two years thereafter — that is, on February 
6, 1778 — the King of France entered into two treaties with 
the new nation : one of alliance, and one of amity and com- 
merce ; the essential and direct end of the first being, as de- 
clared in the second article, "to maintain effectually the lib- 
erty, sovereignty, and independence absolute and unlimited 
of the said United States, as well in matters of government 
as of commerce." Article 5 stipulated that, if the United 
States should conquer the British in the Northern parts of 
America, or the Bermuda Islands, those countries or islands 
should be confederated with, or be made dependent upon, the 
said United States. Article 7 stipulated that if His Majesty 
the King of France should attack any of the islands in the 
Gulf of Mexico, belonging to Great Britain, or islands near 
that gulf, such islands should, in case of success, appertain to 
the Crown of France. In Article 6 the king renounced the 
possession of the Bermudas, as well as those parts of North 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 163 

America that, by the treaty of 1763, were acknowledged to 
belong to Great Britain, or to the United States, before 
called British colonies, or which then were, or had lately 
been, under the power of the Crown of Great Britain. By 
Article 11 the United States guaranteed to His Majesty his 
present possessions in America, as well as those he might 
acquire by the future treaty of peace ; while His Majesty 
guaranteed to the United States not only their liberty, sover- 
eignty, and independence in both matters of government and 
commerce, but also their possessions, and the conquests that 
they might make from Great Britain during the war, as pro- 
vided in the previous article. The Declaration of Independ- 
ence bore the caption : " The unanimous Declaration of the 
United States of America ; " the names of the States w^ere 
given, with the signers at the end. One of the French treaties 
was made with " the thirteen United States of North Amer- 
ica," the other with " the United States of North America ; " 
the names of the States being added in both cases. Beyond 
these general terms neither the Declaration nor the treaties 
contained one word describing the new nation. Were the 
terms clothed with such definite meaning that all the world 
knew just what the new nation was ? 

In a social and political sense " the thirteen British col- 
onies in North America," previous to 1776, stood for clear 
and definite ideas. They were the thirteen communities 
planted by England, at least by Englishmen, in the sev- 
enteenth and eighteenth centuries on the eastern shore of 
North America, between the St. Croix and Altamaha Rivers ; 
communities that had an individual history and a collective 
history which plainly marked them off, to the minds of 
Europeans, from the French settlements to the north and the 
Spanish settlements to the south. Nor did they lose their 
individuality even when these French and Spanish settle- 
ments, after 1763, took rank with them as American colonies 
of the British Crown. Who were the people that put forth 
the Declaration of Independence was therefore well under- 



l64 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

derstood wherever that Declaration was read ; as it was, like- 
wise, who entered into the treaties with prance in 1778. 

But what the names found in the Declaration and French 
treaties stood for in a geographical and territorial sense was 
not equally plain. " Massachusetts," " Virginia," " Carolina," 
for example, had meant very different things at different 
times. Nor did they represent definitely ascertained units in 
1776. Probably, too, there were no two States lying side by 
side between which there were not pending boundary-dis- 
putes. The chapters on the " Thirteen Colonies as Constituted 
by the Royal Charters " make that sufificiently plain. Then 
there arose sharp controversies as to the division and pro- 
prietorship of the country beyond the Alleghany Mountains. 
But above these internal territorial questions towered one 
that may be called external, viz. : " What is the extent of the 
thirteen States of America considered as a whole ? " Neither 
the Declaration nor the treaties contained any answer ; so far 
from it, the name used in these documents might mean, and 
soon came to mean, very different things to different people. 
For instance, although the King of France entered into the 
defensive alliance of 1778 solely to make sure and effectual 
the liberty, sovereignty, and absolute independence of the 
United States, in less than two years he used his influence to 
induce his allies to consent to the Alleghany Mountains as a 
western boundary, which would have cut off fully one half of 
the territory that the United States claimed, and that Great 
Britain ultimately conceded. Again, the United States de- 
scribed in 1779 in the instructions to John Adams, commis- 
sioner to negotiate a peace, are not geographically the same 
United States whose independence was acknowledged at Paris 
in 1782, Hence it is plain that England might, the day after 
the French treaties were signed, or even the day after the Dec- 
laration was published, have conceded the independence of 
the States in the very terms used in those documents, and 
still have left unsettled a territorial question larger than the 
one which brought on the French and Indian war in 1754. It 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 165 

is quite clear, therefore, that in 1776 the United States were 
not as definitely marked off from other nations territorially 
as they were from other peoples politically and socially. 

At the beginning the United States were a purely federal ' 
nation and government. They could not touch directly a sin- 
gle citizen, a single dollar, or a single foot of land. They 
were dependent upon the States individually for a Congress, 
a treasury, an army, and a capital. The States made up the 
United States. At different times, in the course of the war, 
Congress offered land-bounties for volunteers in the Conti- 
nental line, but when the offers were made Congress had no 
lands, and, had it not been for the Northwestern cessions, 
it would have been compelled to ask the States for special 
grants with which to satisfy them. When the time came to 
instruct the national representatives abroad in regard to the 
national limits, the federal principle was strictly followed. 
Hence Mr. Jay, who went to Spain in 1779, was instructed, 
October 4, 1780, to insist upon the Mississippi River because 
it was " the boundary of several States in the Union." On 
January 8, 1782, a committee of which Mr. Madison was a 
member, to which had been referred certain papers in regard 
to the prospective negotiations for peace with His Britannic 
Majesty, thus stated the rule by which the national boun- 
daries should be ascertained : 

" Under his authority the limits of these States, while in the 
character of colonies, were established ; to these limits the 

' As Mr. G. T. Curtis points out, the term "federal" or "federalist" has 
been used in our politics in three distinct senses : First, in its philosophical sense, 
in that of federal in distinction from national ; second, in that of a supporter of 
the Constitution, when it was before the people for their adoption ; third, in that 
of a member of the political party at the head of which stood Washington. The 
three meanings all appeared within the limits of a few years. In 1787 Hamilton 
was not a Federalist, because opposed to the continuance of the Confederation, 
and desirous of a National Government ; in 1788 he was a Federalist, because he 
desired the adoption of the Constitution, and he continued a Federalist, because 
he favored a particular political policy. History of the Constitution, II., 497. 
The word is used above in its proper pliilosopliical sense. 



l66 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

United States, considered as independent sovereignties, have 
succeeded. Whatsoever territorial rights, therefore, belonged 
to them before the Revolution were necessarily devolved upon 
them at the era of independence." 

Then follows a long argument to show that this principle 
would give the United States the territories that they 
claimed in the instructions soon to be mentioned.' This re- 
port was referred to a second committee, which reported it 
back, August i6th following, with a mass of "facts 'and obser- 
vations" sustaining its positions. This document covers forty- 
pages of the printed journal, and is the best statement extant 
of the territorial rights of the States. It makes very promi- 
nent the fact that Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, 
Virginia, and the two Carolinas and Georgia claimed to the 
Mississippi River. This was pleading, the royal charters as 
modified by the treaty of 1763. But if His Majesty should 
reply that at the beginning of the war he, and not the colo- 
nies, was seized of the Western country, the American Com- 
missioners could meet the claim with the argument that — 

"The character in which he was so seized was that of kinsf 
of the thirteen colonies collectively taken. Being stripped of 
this character, its [his] rights descended to the United States 
for the following reasons : (i) The United States are to be con- 
sidered in many respects as one undivided independent nation, 
inheriting those rights which the King of Great Britain en- 
joyed as not appertaining to any one particular State, while he 
was what they are now, the superintending governor of the 
whole. (2) The King of Great Britain has been dethroned as 
King of the United States by the joint efforts of the whole. 
(3) The very country in question hath been conquered through 
the means of the common labors of the United States."' 

Under the third specification the reference is, of course, to 
the conquest of George Rogers Clark. 

' The Secret Journals, III., 151 et seq, 
* Ibid., 198, 199. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 167 

In these reports the charge that the from sea-to-sea char- 
ters were due to geographical ignorance is rebutted ; the view 
that they sprang from a desire to hold the West against Spain 
is advanced;' and the theory that the proclamation of 1763 
had worked a limitation of the colonies on the west is ex- 
pressly set aside in favor of the theory held by Washington 
in 1767, viz., a temporary device for quieting the Indians. 
The stress laid on the chartered extension of certain States to 
the West becomes all the more significant when we remem- 
ber that for several years some of the States, and particularly 
Maryland, had been denying that the West belonged to the 
claimant States at all. At the same time, the American com- 
missioners were to plead uti possidetis, growing out of the 
Clark conquest of the country beyond the Ohio, if the appeal 
to the charters did not prove effectual. 

The events that at last compelled England to treat for 
peace are not pertinent to the present inquiry. The year 
1782 found her ready to treat ; the final commission given to 
Mr. Oswald, her principal representative in the Paris discus- 
sions with the Americans, owing to the insistance of Mr. 
Jay, formally acknowledged the independence of the United 
States ; and this acknowledgment became the point of de- 
parture for the later negotiation. But all this left many very 
difificult questions to be adjusted, such as the fisheries, com- 
pensation to Loyalists, and especially the boundaries. 

The instructions given to John Adams by Congress, bearing 
date August 14, 1779, are the earliest authoritative statement 
of the territorial claims of the United States with which I am 
acquainted. Only disappointment came from Mr. Adams's 
mission to Europe at that time ; but these instructions were 

' " Had the interval between those seas been precisely ascertained, it is not 
proljable that the King of England would have divided the cliartered boundaries 
now in question into more governments. For perhaps his principal object at that 
time was to acquire by that of occupancy which originated in this Western World, 
to wit, by charters, a title of the lands comprehended therein against foreign 
powers." — The Secret Journals, IH., 177. 



l68 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

substantially those under which the commissioners acted in 
1782. They claimed on the northeast the St. Johns River; on 
the north, the proclamation line of 1763 as far as the foot of 
Lake Nipissing, and beyond that point a straight line drawn 
to the source of the Mississippi; on the west, the Mississippi 
to parallel 31° north; on the south, the northern boundary of 
Florida as established in 1763; and on the east, the ocean. 
Mr. Adams was instructed " strongly to contend that the 
whole of the said countries and islands lying within the 
boundaries aforesaid ... be yielded to the powers of 
the States to which they respectively belong," a clear out- 
cropping of the federal idea; " but, notwithstanding the clear 
right of these States, and the importance of the object, yet 
they are so much influenced by the dictates of religion and 
humanity, and so desirous of complying with the earnest re- 
quest of their allies, that if the line to be drawn from the 
mouth of the Lake Nipissing to the head of the Mississippi 
cannot be obtained without continuing the war for that pur- 
pose, you are hereby empowered to agree to some other line 
between that point and the River Mississippi ; provided the 
same shall in no part thereof be to the southward of lati- 
tude 45° north." Similarly, Mr. Adams was authorized to 
consent that the Northeastern boundary be afterward adjusted 
by commissioners duly appointed for that purpose, if the St. 
Johns could not be obtained. The cession of Canada and 
Nova Scotia was declared " of the utmost importance to the 
peace and commerce of the United States, but it should not 
be made an ultimatum." ' 

Save the ocean and the St. Johns, these were the lines es- 
tablished by the French treaty and the royal proclamation of 
1763. The line northwest of the St. Lawrence could be de- 
fended on the ground that the grant to the Plymouth Com- 
pany was bounded north by the forty-fifth parallel in 1606, 
and by the forty-eighth parallel in 1620. The source of the 



' The Secret Journals, II., 225-228. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 169 

Mississippi had not been discovered in 1779, but it was sup- 
posed to be at least as far north as the Lake of the Woods. 
Had this supposition been correct, the Nipissing line would 
have excluded Great Britain from all the great lakes but 
Lake Superior; the real Nipissing line, however, would have 
left nearly the whole of that lake, with large parts of Michi- 
gan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to that power. At the close of 
the Revolution the Mississippi was the natural, and, we may 
say, indispensable Western boundary of the United States ; 
next to independence, which was, in fact, already conced- 
ed, our extension to that river was the most important ques- 
tion involved in the negotiation, far transcending the St. Johns, 
compensation to the Loyalists, and even the fisheries. This 
was the question, whether the trustee commissioned twenty 
years before to transfer the West from the France of the Mid- 
dle Ages to the free people who were making for humanity 
a new life in North America, should execute the commission. 
On the British side the negotiation was opened by Mr. 
Oswald, under the direction of the Rockingham ministry ; on 
the American side, by Dr. Franklin. The promptness with 
vi^hich the British Commissioner consented to all the boun- 
daries of the Adams instructions appeared to show that the 
trustee was ready to transfer the West without objection. In 
fact, those boundaries were incorporated in the treaty draft 
sent to London as late as the early days of October. Nor is 
it probable that these lines would have been seriously ob- 
jected to if the courts of Paris and Madrid had not meddled 
with the question. Before taking up that topic, however, at- 
tention must be drawn to another fact that strikingly illus- 
trates the pliable temper of Mr. Oswald, as well as the yield- 
ing spirit of the Court of London in the first stage of the 
negotiations. Dr. Franklin actually proposed that the British 
Crown should cede the whole of Canada to the United States." 



' "The territory of the United States and that of Canada, liy long extended 
frontiers, touch each other. The settlers on the frontiers of the American prov- 



I/O THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

This proposition was finally rejected on the one side, and 
dropped on the other, but for a time there seemed to be a 
probability that the cession would actually be made. Mr. 
Oswald certainly listened to it with favor, and he reported 
the British ministers, to whom he communicated the proposi- 
tion, as not offering particular objection. 

In previous chapters we have seen that in the sixteenth 
century Spain despised her grand opportunity to take posses- 
sion of the Mississippi River, and that in the seventeenth she 
allowed it to pass quietly into the hands of France. At the 
close of the French and Indian war, the western half of the 
great valley, with the exclusive possession of the mouth of 
the river, passed into her hands ; but this was only a partial 
recovery of what she had before lost, and was a compensation 
for Florida, that she was obliged to cede to England in ex- 
change for Havana. 

Responding to the pressing intercessions of France, and to 
the promptings of her own ambition, Spain declared war 
against England in June, 1779. In America she hoped to re- 
cover Florida and to strengthen her position on the Missis- 



inces are generally the most disorderly of the people, who, being far removed 
from the eye and control of their respective governments, are more bold in com- 
mitting offences against neighbors and are forever occasioning complaints and 

furnisliing matter for fresh differences between their States 

" Britain possesses Canada. Her chief advantage from that possession consists 
in the trad^; for peltry. Her expenses in governing and defending that settlement 
must be considerable. It might be humiliating to her to give it up on the demand 
of America. Perhaps America wjll not demand it. Some of her political rulers 
may consider the fear of such a neighbor as a means of keeping tlie thirteen 
States more united among themselves and more attentive to military discipline. 
But, on the mind of the people in general, would it not have an excellent effect if 
Britain should voluntarily offer to give up this province ; though on these condi- 
tions : That she shall in all times coming have and enjoy the right of free 
trade thither, unencumbered with any duties whatsoever ; that so much of the 
vacant lands there shall be sold as will raise a sum sufficient to pay for the houses 
burnt by the British troops and their Indians, and also to indemnify the Royal- 
ists for the confiscation of their estates."— Diplomatic Correspondence, III., 388 
et seq. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. I? I 

sippi. How thoroughly these projects had been thought out 
at that time may be questionable ; but Spain was careful to 
demand in her engagement with France a stipulation that left 
her free to exact from the United States, " as the price of her 
friendship, a renunciation of every part of the basin of the St. 
Lawrence and the lakes, of the navigation of the Mississippi, 
and of all the land between that river and the Alleghanies." ' 
Hoping to effect treaties with the Court of Madrid similar to 
those already effected with the Court of Paris, Congress de- 
spatched John Jay as an envoy at the end of the year 1779, 
authorizing him to guarantee to His Catholic Majesty, Flor- 
ida, East and West, if he should conquer it and the fortunes 
of war should leave it in his hands at the peace : " Provided 
always, that the United States shall enjoy the free navigation 
of the River Mississippi into and from the sea." He was also 
particularly to endeavor to obtain some convenient port or 
ports below the thirty-first degree of north latitude on the 
Mississippi for all merchant-vessels, goods, wares, and mer- 
chandises belonging to the inhabitants of the United States.^ 
The free navigation of the Mississippi was already a practical 
question. In 1779 both Pennsylvania and Virginia had con- 
siderable populations west of the mountains; settlements were 
springing up in the valleys of the Holston and the Kentucky, 
while Louisville dates from the George Rogers Clark expe- 
dition ; and there were the old French settlements on the 
Wabash and in the Illinois that had always enjoyed the free 
use of the great river. By that time, too, there were several 
American merchants in New Orleans — ^men from Boston, 
New York, and Philadelphia; and these merchants, in the 
years 1776-78, with the consent of the Spanish governor, 
shipped arms and munitions up the Mississippi and Ohio to 
Pittsburg. Plainly, therefore. Congress was simply doing its 
duty in looking out for the interests of the scattered settle- 



' Bancroft : History, VI., 183. Boston, 1879. 
' The Secret Journals, II., 261 et seq. 



172 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ments beyond the mountains. But the Spanish Court would 
not listen to the overture, nor receive Mr. Jay as an accred- 
ited envoy. The reasons that controlled its conduct are a 
material part of this chapter of Western history. 

First, the war was proving to be much more protracted 
and more costly than France and Spain had anticipated ; and 
at the opening of 1780 they desired nothing so much as a 
speedy peace, provided measurably satisfactory terms could be 
made. This desire led France to wish a full alliance between 
the United States and Spain, since such an alliance would 
lead to a more vigorous prosecution of the war while it lasted ; 
and it would no doubt have had the same effect upon Spain, 
but for her dread of everything that touched, or seemed to 
touch, her own interests on the Mississippi. France there- 
fore began to exert a steady pressure upon Congress, to in- 
duce that body to recede from its demand for the free navi- 
gation of the river, and Congress, yielding to the pressure and 
to the depression of feeling produced by the wasting continu- 
ance of the war, withdrew, February 15, 1781, the offensive 
ultimatum. Moreover, the French representatives at Phila- 
delphia, first Gerard and afterward Luzerne, told Congress 
repeatedly that the United States had no valid claim to the 
country west of the king's line of 1763. One object of the 
French ministers in insisting upon this boundary was, as m'C 
shall soon see, to keep the United States out of the way of 
Spain in the Western country, and another object was to keep 
the conditions of peace on the part of the United States 
within narrow limits. 

But this modification of Mr. Jay's instructions, made con- 
trary to his advice, wholly failed to accomplish its object. 
At first Count Florida Blanca, the Spanish Prime Minister, 
had tacitly consented to the Mississippi as our Western boun- 
dary ; but, now that the other obstacle to a treaty was out of 
the way, he held that such a westward extension was alto- 
gether inadmissible. The fact is, the Clark conquest of the 
Northwest, the spread of Western settlements, and the stay- 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 173 

ing power that the States were showing in the war, were re- 
veaHng to the Spanish Court the fact that an Anglo-Ameri- 
can republic, stretching down the Atlantic slope from Nova 
Scotia to Florida and spreading over the AUeghanies to the 
great lakes and the great river, meant a future menace to 
His Catholic Majesty's North American dominions; and the 
annexation of Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and portions of 
Mexico to the United States show how well grounded these 
fears were. Spain had always striven to exclude all rival 
powers from the Gulf of Mexico ; she expected to regain 
Florida and the practical control of the Gulf at the peace ; 
and to allow the United States to extend westward to the 
river and southward to parallel 31° seemed little less than 
abandoning her dearest American interests. At that time, 
too, Spain was the greatest colonial empire of the world ; and 
it was no more the business of her king to offer a premium 
on colonial revolutions than it was the business of Francis of 
Austria to foster rebellion. 

In the third place, Galvez, the gallant young Governor of 
Louisiana, had captured and was holding possession of the 
British posts on the Gulf and the Mississippi : Pensacola, Mo- 
bile, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. These conquests had daz- 
zled the Spanish imagination, opening up new possibilities of 
territorial expansion in the vast region west of the Appa- 
lachian Mountains, including, perhaps, a complete retrieval 
of the great blunder of one hundred years before. Now that 
West Florida was in her hands, she remembered its ancient 
extension northward. Her ambition, growing with what it 
fed on, Spain now conceived the thought of laying claim to 
the whole West, as far as the lakes. To lay the foundation for 
such claim, the Spanish commandant at St. Louis, in the dead 
of the winter of 1780-81, sent an expedition into the very heart 
of the Northwest, to seize the post of St. Joseph, established 
by La Salle in 1679, just after he had sent back the Griffin 
from Green Bay. This expedition was completely successful ; 
Don Eugenio Purre, the commander, seized the post, captur- 



174 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ing the garrison, and took formal possession of the region 
commanded by it, and of the Illinois River, displaying the 
Spanish standard in token of conquest and carrying off the 
English colors as a Spanish title-deed. News of this exploit 
reached Philadelphia by way of Madrid and Paris in the 
Spring of 1782, accompanied by this message from Mr. Jay 
to Mr. Livingston : " When you consider the ostensible ob- 
ject of this expedition, the distance of it, the formalities with 
which the place, the country, and the river were taken posses- 
sion of in the name of His Catholic Majesty, I am persuaded 
it will not be necessary for me to swell this letter with re- 
marks that would occur to a reader of far less penetration 
than yourself." ' Dr. Franklin also saw in the expedition a 
purpose to " coop up " the United States between the Alle- 
ghanies and the sea, and he demanded that Congress should 
insist upon the Mississippi as a western boundary, and upon 
its free navigation from its source to the ocean. Nor can 
there be any doubt that the Illinois towns would have been 
seized and held by the Spaniards, if they had not already 
passed into the custody of the Virginia troops. While this 
Northwestern expedition did not occur in time to influence 
the discussions with Mr. Jay at Madrid, it is still a material 
part of the history as a whole, and it strikingly illustrates the 
Spanish policy. 

Mr. Jay wholly failed to accomplish the object for which 
he was sent to Madrid ; but he acquired a knowledge' of 
Spanish purposes, and had an experience of Spanish charac- 
ter, that enabled him to render his country invaluable service 
at Paris as one of the commissioners who negotiated the 
treaty of peace with Great Britain. 

As Mr. Jay was leaving Madrid for Paris, in the early 
summer of 1782, Count Florida Blanca told him that the 
Count de Aranda, the Spanish ambassador at the French 
Court, was authorized to continue the discussion of a treaty 



' Diplomatic Correspondence, VIII., 78. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 1/5 

between Spain and the United States. In due time, Jay put 
himself in communication with the Count ; but as the Span- 
iard would never show his full powers, and the American 
would not treat without seeing them, their frequent confer- 
ences were all informal and non-official. However, in these 
conferences the Spanish diplomatist fully disclosed the ideas 
of his government touching the Western country. 

Having drawn from Mr. Jay the statement that the 
United States claimed on the south to the proclamation-line 
of 1763, and on the west to the middle of the Mississippi, the 
Count replied : That the Western country had never be- 
longed to the ancient English colonies, or been claimed by 
them ; that, previous to the Treaty of Paris, the West had be- 
longed to France, and that it continued, after that treaty, a 
distinct part of the British dominions ; that, in consequence 
of Spanish conquests in West Florida and on the Mississippi 
and Illinois Rivers, the title had become vested in Spain ; 
and that, supposing the Spanish right did not cover all the 
country, it was possessed by nations of Indians, free and in- 
dependent, whom the States had no right to disturb. He 
therefore proposed a longitudinal line on the east side of the 
river as a boundary between Spain and the United States, 
adding that he did not mean to dispute about a few acres or 
miles. What De Aranda's " longitudinal line " was he after- 
ward made plain, by drawing a red line on a copy of Mitchell's 
map " from a lake near the confines of Georgia, but east of 
the Flint River, to the confluence of the Kanawha with the 
Ohio ; thence round the western shores of Lake Erie and 
Huron; and* thence round Lake Michigan to Lake Supe- 
rior." ' West and south of this line Spain should hold ; 
east, the United States ; while north of the lakes the United 
States might make such terms with Great Britain as she 
could. Here we may drop the so-called negotiation with 
Spain, with the remark that until the year 1795 the Missis- 

' Diplomatic Correspondence, VIII., 150-152. 



1/6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

sippi River remained an insuperable obstacle in the way of 
an American treaty with that power. 

The Spanish claim to the West was dangerous mainly be- 
cause, in a modified form, it was supported by France. When 
Dr. Franklin and Mr. Jay pointed out to the Count de Ver- 
gennes, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, the extrav- 
agance of De Aranda's claim, the Count was " very cautious 
and reserved ; " but M. Rayneval, his principal secretary, 
who was present, was talkative, and expressed the opinion 
that the Americans claimed more than they had a right to. 
Soon after, Rayneval suggested to Mr. Jay a " conciliatory 
line; " and in a memoir dated September 6th he explained at 
length what he meant by it. In this paper the secretary 
stated the conflicting United States and Spanish claims, and 
then urged that the one had no support in colonial history, 
and that the other was not justified by the Spanish conquests. 
His conciliatory line he drew from a point on the Gulf mid- 
way between the Appalachicola and the Mobile, nearly due 
north to the Cumberland River, and then down the Cumber- 
land to the Ohio. The savages west of this limit should be 
free, under the protection of Spain ; those east should be free, 
under the protection of the United States. Spain would lose 
almost the whole course of the Ohio ; America would retain 
her settlements on that river, and have a large space in which 
to plant new ones. Spain had no claim to the lands north of 
the Ohio ; " their fate must be regulated with the Court of 
London." The navigation of the Mississippi would be con- 
trolled by the power owning its banks.' 

Mr. Jay very naturally concluded that the Count de Ver- 
gennes was the real author of this scheme. He concluded, 
also, that in case the American Commissioners would not 
consent to it, then France would aid Spain in a negotiation 
to divide the West with England. It is now well known that 
such was, in substance, the programme of the two counts. 



' Diplomatic Correspondence, VIII., 156 et seq. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 1/7 

As a first step toward carrying it out, M. Rayneval was sent 
on a secret mission to England, where he informed Lord 
Shelburne that his chief would not support the Americans 
in several of^ their claims, as the fisheries and the Missis- 
sippi. 

The destiny of the West had thus become a European 
question involving the three powers, all of which had inter- 
ests of their own to look after in both worlds, England 
would naturally make the best terms that she could with her 
enemies, one and all ; more specifically, she would obtain 
whatever advantage she could in the negotiations with the 
Americans from the jealousies of the two other powers, Spain 
was resolved on the recovery of Gibraltar as well as of Florida, 
and France was committed to her support. France had not 
entered into alliance with America from love of the American 
cause, but from hatred of England ; and now that a rival 
power to England had been raised up on the shores of the 
New World, Vergennes was apprehensive that power would 
become so strong as to feel wholly independent of France, 
He was, indeed, committed irrevocably to the independence 
of the United States so far as England was concerned ; but 
he was also determined that their independence should not 
be finally settled until a general peace had been arrived at. 
Possibly the country beyond the Alleghany Mountains could 
be traded off for Gibraltar, or be balanced against some other 
make-weight in the diplomatic scale. Fortunately, for his 
purpose, the treaty of 1778 bound the United States not to 
conclude a peace with England until France should also 
conclude one; and, as early as June, 1781, he had induced 
Congress to instruct the commissioners who were to negoti- 
ate with England " to make the most candid and confidential 
communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our 
generous ally the King of France ; to undertake nothing in 
the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge 
and concurrence, and to make them sensible how much we rely 
upon His Majesty's influence for effectual support in every- 



178 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

thing that may be necessary to the present security or future 
prosperity of the United States." ' 

Such, in brief, was the diplomatic situation in Paris when 
the American negotiation entered on its second stage. In 
this tremendous game of politics, the fate of the West seemed 
to hang on issues wholly beyond the control of the American 
Commissioners. No more critical or anxious moment can be 
found in the whole history of our diplomacy. Determined, if 
possible, to keep their country from becoming the football of 
the three powers, the commissioners resolved, in disregard of 
their instructions,' to propose to the British Cabinet a nego- 
tiation to be conducted without the knowledge of the French 
ministers. Lord Shelburne, now Prime Minister, for reasons 
of state that are here immaterial, promptly accepted this over- 
ture, and the negotiation took a new departure. 

Owing to important successes of the British arms in the 
West Indies and at Gibraltar, and to the discovery of a want 
of good understanding between America and France, the 
British ministers now held a firmer tone than in the first 
negotiation. The determination of the ministers to obtain a 
compensation for the British refugees whose property had been 
confiscated by the States became the occasion for reopening 
the question of boundaries in the Northeast, the West, and 
the Northwest. Mr. Strachey was sent over the Channel to 
assist Mr. Oswald in retreating from some of his concessions ;. 
and Lord Fitzmaurice tells us that his instructions were : 

" To urge the claims of England, under the proclamation of 
1763, to the lands between the Mississippi and the Western 
boundary of the States, and to bring forward the French boun- 

' The Secret Journals, II., 435. 

^ Mr. Lyman, Diplomacy of the United States, I., 121, note, relates the fol- 
lowing anecdote, which he says he has from a direct source. Dr. Franklin, one 
day sitting, during the discussion of the question of instructions, in Mr. Jay's 
room at Paris, said to that gentleman, " Will you break your instructions ? " 
"Yes," replied Mr. Jay, who was smoking a pipe, " as I break this pipe ;" and 
immediately threw it into the fire. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 1 79 

dary of Canada, which was more extensive at some points than 
that of the proclamati<jn of 1763. H<j was to urge these claims, 
and the right of the King to the ungranted domain, not indeed 
for their own sake, but in order to gain some compensation for 
the refugees, either by a direct cession of territory in their 
favor, or by engaging the half, or some proportion of what the 
back lands might produce when sold, or a sum mortgaged on 
those lands ; or by the grant of a favorable boundary of Nova 
Scotia, extending, if possible, so as to include the province of 
Maine ; or, if that could not be obtained, the province of Saga- 
dahock, or, at the very least, Penobscot." 

Lord Shelburne urged the same view, in a strong despatch 
to Oswald. 

" As a resource to meet the demands of the refugees the 
matter of the boundaries and back lands presents itself. Inde- 
pendent of all the nonsense of charters, I mean, when they talk 
of extending as far as the sun sets, the soil is, and has always 
been acknowledged to be the King's. For the good of America, 
whatever the government may be, new provinces must be 
erected on those back lands and down the Mississippi ; and 
supposing them to be sold, what can be so reasonable as that 
part of the province, where the King's property alone is in ques- 
tion, should be applied to furnish subsistence to those, whom 
for the sake of peace he can never consistently with his honor 
entirely abandon." ° 

This was a very different view from the one that Oswald 
had held when he declined " any attempt at asserting the 
claims of the English Crown over the ungranted domains, 
deeming that no real distinction could be drawn between 
them and other sovereign rights which were necessarily to be 
ceded." 

It is impossible to say much about the Western boundary 
discussions, because we know next to nothing about them. 

' Life of Earl Slielburnc, IIL, 281, 282. '■' Ibid., IIL, 284. 



l80 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Other controversies at Paris, far less important, were rer 
ported much more fully ,- but here the information that we 
possess only piques our curiosity. The right to fish on the 
banks of Newfoundland was thought more valuable in 1782 
than the ownership of the valleys of Ohio, the prairies of 
Illinois, and the forests of Michigan. What would we not 
give for a full review of the whole subject from the pen that 
wrote the "Canada Pamphlet" and the "Reply to Hillsbor- 
ough ? " 

The Mississippi was finally conceded by the British Cabi- 
net. Still, this concession left unanswered the question 
where the Northern boundary should strike the Mississippi. 
Writing to Minister Townsend, November 8th, Mr. Strachey 
says : " 1 despatch the boundary line originally sent to you by 
Mr, Oswald, and two other lines proposed by the American 
Commissioners after my arrival at Paris. Either of these you 
are to choose. They are both better than the original line, as 
well in respect to Canada as to Nova Scotia." ' Mr. Adams 
tells us that one of these lines was the forty-fifth parallel, 
northwest of the St. Lawrence, and the other the line of the 
middle of the lakes. Most fortunately for us, the British 
ministers, owing, no doubt, to their desire to give Canada 
frontage on the four lakes, and to a preference for a water 
boundary, chose that line which left the Northwest intact. 
Had the forty-fifth parallel become the boundary, nearly one- 
half of Lakes Huron and Michigan, and of the States of 
Michigan and Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, would have 
fallen to Great Britain. Writing to Robert R. Livingston, 
the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the commission- 
ers say: "Congress will observe, that although our Northern 
line is in a certain part below the latitude of forty-five, yet in 
others it extends above it, divides the Lake Superior, and 
gives us access to its western and southern waters, from which 
aline in that latitude would have excluded us." " If the com- 

' Fitzmaurice : Life of Earl Shelburne, III., 295. 
^ Diplomatic Correspondence, X., 118. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. l8l 

missioners had understood Northwestern geography better, to 
say nothing of the then unknown resources of Lake Superior, 
they would have stated the argument with even greater 
strength. 

To close the war that began on Lexington Green, April 
19, 1775, three separate treaties were necessary. France and 
the United States conducted simultaneous negotiations with 
different English commissioners, the understanding being that 
the preliminaries should be signed the same day. On Novem- 
ber 29th Dr. Franklin wrote to M. de Vergennes that the 
American articles were already agreed upon, and that he 
hoped to lay a copy of them before his Excellency the next 
day. Except a single secret article, they were duly communi- 
cated ; but, to the astonishment and mortification of the Count, 
they were already signed, and therefore binding, as far as the 
commissioners could make them so. The game for despoiling 
the young Republic of one-half her territorial heritage was 
effectually blocked. Vergennes bitterly reproached Franklin 
for the course that he and his associates had followed, and 
Franklin replied, making such defence as he could, admitting 
no more than that a point of bicnsc'ance had been neglected. 
The American Congress and Secretary for Foreign Affairs at 
first were also disposed to blame the commissioners; but so 
anxious was the country for peace and so much more favora- 
ble were the terms obtained than had been expected, that 
murmurs of dissatisfaction soon gave place to acclaims of 
gratification and delight. The preamble to the treaty con- 
tained the saving clause that it should not go into effect un- 
til France and England came to an understanding, a fact that 
the astute Franklin did not fail to press upon the attention of 
the irate Vergennes. However, that condition was soon ful- 
filled, and a general peace assured. 

The definitive treaty of peace between the United States 
and England, which is merely the preliminary treaty over 
again, with the exception of a secret article, the conditions 
of which were never fulfilled, and so never became operative, 



l82 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

was signed September 3, 1783. His Britannic Majesty acknowl- 
edged the United States to be free, sovereign, and independent 
States, and relinquished for himself, his heirs, and successors 
" all claim to the government, propriety, and territorial right 
of the same and every part thereof; " assigning them boun- 
daries that have proved to be more satisfactory than those 
proposed by Congress in 1779 could have been. It was a 
treaty of partition of the British Empire, and of the English- 
speaking world. At the time, British statesmen generally 
dreaded its effect on the Mother Country, but time has proved 
it to be a godsend to her as well as to America. 

The happy issue of this negotiation was very largely due 
to William, Earl of Shelburne, afterward first Marquis of 
Lansdowne. Both as Secretary for the Colonies in the Rock- 
ingham Cabinet, and as Prime Minister, he was governed by 
the sentiment that he thus expressed : " Reconciliation with 
America on the noblest terms by the noblest means." Had 
the negotiation remained open at the downfall of his ministry, 
which was largely the result of the liberal terms that he gave 
the Americans, and so passed into the hands of the Fox-North 
coalition, no one can tell what the fate of the West would 
have been. 

It is impossible nicely to divide among Dr. Franklin, Mr. 
Adams, and Mr. Jay the honor of saving the West to their 
country. On that issue, Mr. Adams was unquestionably 
firm. A tradition has floated down the stream of diplomacy 
to the effect that Dr. Franklin was indifferent, or at least dis- 
posed to yield ; but we have Mr. Jay's express testimony to 
the contrary,' to say nothing of the improbability of the Doc- 
tor's taking such a course, in view of his Western record as 
set forth in a previous chapter. However, the man who goes 
through the original documents, including the discussions at 
Madrid as well as those at Paris, will be pretty certain to con- 
clude that the Old Northwest has greater reason for gratitude 
to John Jay than to either of his colleagues. 

' Sparks: Works of Franklin, X., 8. 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 183 

It is not easy to tell what were the decisive arguments in 
this Western controversy. It is often said, and particularly by 
Western writers, that the issue turned mainly on the George 
Rogers Clark conquest. This view rests on tradition rather 
than on historical evidence, and I venture the opinion that it 
is largely erroneous. No man, at least, can read the reports on 
the national boundaries submitted to Congress without seeing 
that far more reliance was laid, by the committees that pre- 
pared them, on the colonial charters than on Clark's great 
achievement. The report of August 16, 1782, urges the argu- 
ment : " The very country in question hath been conquered 
through the means of the common labors of the United 
States ; " " for a considerable distance beyond the Alleghany 
Mountains, and particularly on the Ohio, American citizens 
are actually settled at this day " — " fencible men," not " behind 
any of their fellow-citizens in the struggle for liberty," who 
will be thrown back within the power of Great Britain if the 
Western territory is surrendered to her ; but the same report 
contains page after page of arguments based on the charters 
and on colonial history. It was indeed most fortunate that 
the Virginia troops were in possession of the Illinois and the 
Wabash at the close of the war, but there is no reason to 
think that the Clark conquest, separate and apart from the 
colonial titles, ever would have given the United States the 
Great West. Writing to Secretary Livingston, the American 
Commissioners give color to the idea that the decision turned 
on the charters and not on the conquest. They say the Court 
of Great Britain "claimed not only all the lands in the West- 
ern country and on the Mississippi, which were not ex- 
pressly included in our charters and governments, but also 
all such lands within them as remained ungranted by the 
King of Great Britain." " It would be endless," they add, 
" to enumerate all the discussions and arguments on the sub- 
ject." ' It is highly probable that the British ministry, see- 



' Diplomatic Correspondence, X., 117. 



l84 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ing that the West would go to Spain if not to the United 
States, preferred to give it the latter direction. Moreover, the 
Clark conquest was much more potent in" keeping the West 
from falling into the hands of Spain than in wresting it from 
the hands of England. 

The refusal of England to surrender so much of the 
Northwest as remained in her hands at the close of the war, 
is a very striking proof of the reluctance with which she 
consented to the Northwestern boundaries. In July, 1783, 
Washington sent Baron Steuben to General Haldiman, Brit- 
ish commander in Canada, with a commission to receive pos- 
session of Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, Mackinaw, and the 
minor posts ; but Haldiman made reply that he had not re- 
ceived instructions for their surrender, and that he could not 
even discuss the subject with him. At the time there was no 
reason for retaining the posts consistent with national good 
faith ; afterward the British Government alleged as a reason 
the non-fulfilment by this country of certain stipulations of the 
treaty of peace. For thirteen years the Northwestern posts 
were sharp thorns in the sides of the United States. The Rev- 
olution was followed by a harassing Indian war that, in reality, 
never ceased until Wayne's victory of the Fallen Timbers, in 
1794 ; and from its first day to its last the savages found al- 
ways sympathy, and often active support, at the British gar- 
risons. British officers, audaciously invading territory which 
they did, not hold at the end of the war, built Fort Miami 
at the rapids of the Maumee, where Perrysburg, O., now 
stands. General Wayne pursued the Indians under the very 
muzzles of the cannon of this fortification, -and laid waste the 
surrounding country to its gates. The Indian war and the 
British occupation, that had been so closely connected, virtu- 
ally ceased at the same time. In 1795, Wayne negotiated 
with the Indians the Treaty of Greenville, and, the year be- 
fore, Jay negotiated with the British Government the treaty 
that bears his name, by which England bound herself to 
yield possession of the posts that she should have yielded in 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 185 

1783. On July II, 1796, a detachment from Wayne's army 
raised the stars and stripes above the stockade and village of 
Detroit, where the French and British colors had successively 
waved, and this act completed the tardy transfer of the Old 
Northwest to the United States. No doubt England had 
some reason to complain of the United States for the imper- 
fect fulfilment of the treaty of 1783 ; but her retention of the 
posts, so calamitous in results to the growing Western settle- 
ments, was largely due to a lingering hope that the young re- 
public would prove a failure, and to a determination to share 
the expected spoil. The fact is, neither England nor Spain 
regarded the Treaty of Paris as finally settling the destiny of 
the country west of the mountains. 

It is not improbable that- the War of 18 12, for a time, 
revived English hopes of again recovering the Northwest. 
Tecumsch strove to erect his " dam " to resist " the mighty 
water ready to overflow his people." Hull's surrender placed 
all Michigan in British hands. General Proctor sought to 
compel the citizens of Detroit to take the oath of allegiance 
to the King of England ; and although Harrison's successes 
on the Maumee and Perry's victory on Lake Erie forced Proc- 
tor to evacuate Detroit, a British garrison continued to hold 
Mackinaw to the close of the war. Only three of the thirty- 
two years lying between 1783 and 18 15 were years of war; 
but for one-half of the whole time the British flag was flying 
on the American side of the boundary line. In the largest 
sense, therefore, the destiny of the Northwest was not assured 
until the Treaty of Ghent. 

The Iroquois called themselves the owners of the lands 
northwest of the Ohio ; the Indians living on those lands they 
considered simply as occupants or tenants. It is obvious that 
the tenants valued them much more highly than the owners. 
The long wars that the Western Indians waged for Ohio tell 
the story of their affection for their homes. The same wars 
also tell at what fearful cost the American frontier was ex- 
tended west of the Alleghany Mountains. From the defeat 



l86 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

of Braddock, in 1755, onward to Wayne's Treaty, in 1795, 
with a few short intermissions, that frontier was undergoing a 
constant baptism of fire and blood. 

The original United States were bounded on the north by 
Great Britain, on the west and south by Spain, and on the 
east by the Ocean — the last named being the only neighbor 
with whom we never had any trouble. One of the most 
striking evidences of the value of this domain, and of its ad- 
mirable position, is the remarkable growth of the United 
States. An area of eight hundred and twenty-seven thou- 
sand square miles has become an area of three million six 
hundred thousand. Parallel thirty-one degrees north and 
the Mississippi have given place, as boundaries, to the Gulf 
of Mexico, the Rio Grande, and the Pacific Ocean. Our 
marvellous territorial expansion and material development 
westward discourage prophecy ; but, at this time, it does 
not seem probable that the territory wrested from England 
will soon, if ever, cease to be the most valuable part of our 
whole national domain, described by Mr. Gladstone as " a 
natural base for the greatest continuous empire ever estab- 
lished by man." 

The man curious about " what might have been " cannot 
help speculating on the course of history provided any one of 
the limitation-schemes proposed at Paris had prevailed. As 
he reflects on the facts of geography, on the strength and au- 
dacity of American civilization, on the weakness of Spanish 
America and of Spain herself, and on the feeble Canadian 
settlements in 1783, he may conclude that the eastern half of 
the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic Plain would have 
been reunited even if once separated ; that the idea of separa- 
tion, supported in some form by the three powers, was against 
Nature ; that Spain, in particular, lost her only opportunity 
to control the Father of Waters in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, and that the great valley of the West was 
the predestined field of Anglo-Saxon institutions and life. 
There is undeniable force in this reasoning ; perhaps it is al- 



THE NORTHWEST WRESTED FROM ENGLAND. 1 8/ 

together conclusive. At the same time, the proposed limita- 
tion might have turned American events into wholly differ- 
ent channels. What if the Confederacy had fallen to pieces ? 
What if the Constitution of 1787 had never been framed or 
ratified ? What if the United States had become dependent 
upon one of the European powers ? In any one of these 
events, the world would never have seen that magnificent 
growth which has absorbed territories four times as great as 
that bounded by the treaty of 1783, and which furnishes the 
main argument for the conclusion, "It would have made lit- 
tle difference." The longer one considers the subject, the less 
will he be disposed to think that the delivery of the West by 
the trustee appointed in 1763 was a foregone conclusion ; the 
more will he think the retention of the Northwest by Great 
Britain would have been a much more serious mischance than 
the gaining of the Southwest by Spain ; and the more reason 
will he discover for congratulation that the logic of events 
gave us our proper boundaries at the close of the War of Inde- 
pendence, and did not leave us to succumb to untoward fate 
or to renew the struggle with two European powers instead 
of one in after years.^ 

1 Many difficult points arose in the course of the practical establishment of 
the long series of boundaries that the treaty of 1783 gave us on the North. The 
identity of the St. Croix River was settled in 1785, the line through Passama- 
quody Bay in 1817, and the line from the junction of the St. Lawrence and 
parallel 45° to the head of Lake Huron in 1822, each by a joint commission 
The line from the head of the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence, and the line from 
the head of Lake Huron to the Lake of the Woods, were determined in 1842. 
The line from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains — 49° north — 
was fixed in 1818. For a summary statement of the successive steps in settling 
our Northern boundary, see B. A. Hinsdale : How to Study and Teach History, 
chap. XX. 



XL 
THE NORTHWESTERN LAND-CLAIMS. 

The second of the two chapters devoted to the territorial 
questions growing out of the royal patents and charters closed 
with a promise to consider, in the proper place, the similar 
questions affecting the Old Northwest. In fact, the only- 
reason for introducing the charters at all is their bearing on 
Western questions. Accordingly, this chapter will be given 
to a statement of the Western land-claims ; the two fol- 
lowing chapters, to their settlement. Unfortunately, the dis- 
cussion of the whole subject is often colored by State feel- 
ing or by patriotism. Connecticut writers are apt to stand 
for the Connecticut claim, New York writers for the New 
York claim, while Virginians pride themselves on Virginia's 
being the mother of States as well as of statesmen. Again, 
Western men, little disposed to admit that the Northwestern 
States were the children of the Atlantic commonwealths, and 
fond of looking at the subject from a national point of view, 
tend either to belittle or to deny the titles of the claimant 
States to the Western lands. 

In her constitution of 1776, Virginia ceded, released, and 
forever confirmed to the people of Maryland, Pennsylvania, 
and North and South Carolina, the territories contained 
within their charters, so far as they were embraced in her 
charter of 1609, with all the rights of property, jurisdiction, 
and government, and all other rights that had ever been 
claimed by Virginia, except the navigation of certain rivers; 
after which she said : 



THE NORTHWESTERN LAND-CLAIMS. 1 89 

" The western and northern extent of Virginia shall, in all 
other respects, stand as fixed by the charter of King James L, 
in the year one thousand six hundred and nine, and the public 
treaty of peace between the Courts of Britain and France, in 
the year one thousand seven hundred and sixty-three ; unless, 
by act of this Legislature, one or more governments be estab- 
lished westward of the Alleghany Mountains. And no pur- 
chases of lands shall be made of the Indian natives, but on be- 
half of the public, by authority of the General Assembly." 

This declaration meant, that Virginia claimed the whole 
Northwest as falling within her west and northwest lines. 
The claim has been often denied by historians, statesmen, 
lawyers, and pamphleteers, on grounds that will be stated as 
concisely as is consistent with clearness. 

Probably no bolder or stronger denial was ever made than 
that of Hon. Samuel F. Vinton, of counsel for the defendants 
in the case of Virginia vs. Peter M. Garner and others,' be- 
fore the General Court of Virginia, in December, 1845. The 
legal question involved was that of the boundary between the 
States of Virginia and Ohio. In the course of his argument to 
the court Mr. Vinton affirmed the following historical propo- 
sitions : 

(i) " That Virginia, during the War of the Revolution, set 
up a claim to the country beyond the Ohio;" (2) "that she 
never had a valid title to it ; " (3) " that her title, not only to 
it, but to both sides of the Ohio, was disputed by the Con- 

' Garner and the other defendants, citizens of Ohio, were seized by a party of 
Virginians, between low-water and high-water mark, on the north side of tlie 
Ohio River, in the act of assisting some slaves belonging to one Harwood, a 
Virginian, to escape from slavery. The case went up from Wood County to the 
General Court on a special verdict, the question being whether the defendants 
were, at the time of meeting and assisting the slaves, vvilliin tlie jurisdiction 
of Virginia or of Ohio. The case is reported at lengtli in Grattan, Reports of 
Cases decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals and in the General Court of Vir- 
ginia, III., 655. Mr. Vinton's argument was published in pamphlet, Marietta, 
O., 1846 ; and it is also found in the Second Annual Report of the Ohio State 
Fish Commission, 1877. 



190 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

federacy, and by other States ; " (4) " that they claimed all 
that she asserted a right to ; " (5) "that, in the end, she ad- 
justed her claim by compromise ; " (6) " that she relinquished 
her claim beyond the Ohio with the express understanding 
that the acceptance of her act of cession was not to be taken 
as an admission by the Confederacy (who was the grantee) 
that Virginia had a title to the country ceded by her ; " (7) 
" that the separate and acknowledged right of Virginia to the 
country on the lower, and of the Confederacy to that on the 
upper, bank of the Ohio, began with this compromise." 

From these propositions Mr. Vinton deduced others of a 
legal nature that do not here concern us. 

These seven propositions may all be reduced to two, for 
convenience. The first of these, the absolute denial of the 
charter-title, is supported by this chain of reasoning: (i) The 
Virginia grant of 1609 was made in total ignorance of the ex- 
tent of the continent and of the grant sought to be conveyed ; 

(2) the English king at that time had no right or title to the 
lands included within the limits beyond the Atlantic slope; 

(3) the charter was annulled by a writ of quo ivarranto issued 
by the Court of King's Bench in 1624, and was never re- 
newed ; (4) the English Crown's later title to the country be- 
tween the Alleghaniesand the Mississippi was the treaty with 
France in 1763 ; (5) the Crown plainly signified by numerous 
acts, as the proclamation of 1763 and the Walpole grant of 
1772, that colonial Virginia did not extend beyond the moun- 
tains, and that the over-mountain lands were Crown lands; 
and (6) later grants than that of 1609, as those to the Caro- 
lina proprietors, to Baltimore and Penn, and to the New Eng- 
land colonies, show that the Crown did not regard those limits 
as conclusive, either on the sea-shore or in the West. Mr. 
Vinton rested his second cardinal proposition, that Virginia's 
title to the country southeast of the Ohio is a compromise 
with other States and with Congress, made in 1784, on the 
history of the cessions. The cessions will be treated in the 
next chapters, and need not be anticipated here. Nearly all 



THE NORTHWESTERN LAND-CLAIMS. 191 

the judges who gave opinions in Garner's case waived the 
historical issue that Mr. Vinton had raised, on the ground 
that a Virginia court could not question the fundamental law 
of the State ; but many important facts relating to the issue 
were brought out, some of the most pertinent being in regard 
to the creation of counties by the Legislature of Virginia: 
Orange, in 1734; Augusta, in 1738; Botetourt, in 1769, 
" bounded west by the utmost limits of Virginia." The act 
creating one of these counties speaks of " the people situated 
on the waters of the Mississippi " as living " very remote 
from their court-house." Other counties erected before the 
Revolution extended to the Ohio, and embraced Kentucky. 
The Dinwiddie proclamation of 1754, offering lands to volun- 
teers to serve against the French — one hundred thousand 
acres contiguous to the fort at the Forks of the Ohio, and 
one hundred thousand on or near the Ohio — was recognized 
by the Virginia land-law of 1779. In 1752 and 1753 Virginia 
passed acts for encouraging persons to settle on the Missis- 
sippi ("meaning, doubtless, the waters of Ohio"); and in 
1754 and 1755 3-Cts for their protection. Grants of land on 
the southeastern side of the Ohio, made in the colonial period, 
were numerous. Marshall's "Life of Washington" is quoted 
as authority for the statement that the grant made to the Ohio 
Company in 1748 was made as a part of Virginia. The proc- 
lamation of 1763 was obviously designed for the preservation 
of peace with the Indians, and their enjoyment of the hunting- 
grounds. The Treaty of Paris, 1763, limited the colony on 
the west; but Virginia continued to fill up and occupy, both 
geographically and politically, the territory extending to the 
Mississippi, " until that signal act of her sovereignty over the 
Western territories was exercised by her in the cession she 
made of them in March, 1784, and which was consummated 
by the acceptance of it by the United States in Congress 
assembled upon the same day." 

These facts certainly demolish Mr, Vinton's proposition 
that the Virginia claim was " set up " during the Revolution. 



192 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The grant made to the Duke of York in 1664 was 
bounded on the west by the Delaware River. But at the 
beginning of the Revolution, as well as before that time, 
New York claimed a far greater western extension, on these 
grounds : (i) That the grant to the Duke of York and the 
boundary east of the Hudson barred the New England colonies 
on the west ; (2) that the quo zvarranto of 1624 and the grant to 
Penn limited Virginia and Pennsylvania on the west, the first 
by the Alleghanies, the second by the five-degree line west 
of the Delaware; (3) that the country west of these lines be- 
longed to the Iroquois, in the north from times immemorial, 
in the south after the Iroquois conquest of 1664 ; (4) that after 
1624, 1664, and 1 68 1, the pre-emption of the West was vested 
in the Crown, not in particular colonies ; (5) that the acces- 
sion of the Duke of York, the proprietary of the province, to 
the throne, in 1685, af^liated the territory on the two sides 
of the Delaware north of Penn's line ; and (6) that the later 
Iroquois treaties made the whole Western country, from the 
Lower Lakes to the Cumberland Mountains, and from Vir- 
ginia and Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River, a part of 
New York. A report on the Western land-claims, made in 
Congress, November 3, 1781, preferred the New York claims 
to all those with which it conflicted, and thus justified the 
preference : 

" I. It clearly appeared to your committee, that all the lands 
belonging to the Six Nations of Indians, and their tributaries, 
have been in due form put under the protection of the Crown 
of England by the said Six Nations, as appendant to the late 
government of New York, so far as respects jurisdiction only. 

" 2. That the citizens of the said colony of New York have 
borne the burthen both as to blood and treasure, of protecting 
and supporting the said Six Nations of Indians, and their tribu- 
taries, for upwards of one hundred years last past, as the de- 
pendents and allies of the said government. 

"3. That the Crown of England has always considered and 
treated the country of the said Six Nations, and their tributa- 



THE NORTHWESTERN LAND-CLAIMS. I93 

ries, inhabiting as far as the 45th degree of north latitude, as 
appendant to the government of New York. 

" 4. Tliat the neighboring colonies of Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, have also, 
from time to time, by their public acts, recognized and admitted 
the said Six Nations and their tributaries, to be appendant to 
the government of New York. 

" 5. That by Congress accepting this cession, the jurisdic- 
tion of the whole western territory belonging to the Six Na- 
tions, and their tributaries, will be vested in the United States 
greatly to the advantage of the Union." * 

At this distance it is difficult, notwithstanding the particu- 
larity of this report, to repel Mr. Hildreth's characterization of 
the New York claim as the " vaguest and most shadowy of 
all." "" Furthermore, there is reason to think the report part 
of a political scheme that will be duly noticed hereafter. But 
here it is pertinent to point out that this claim was virtually 
the claim to the Northwest vi^hich England made just before 
the French War, characterized by Mr. Parkman as including 
every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken 
a scalp.^ 

The two New England States rested their claims on the 
charters with which the reader is already familiar, Connecti- 
cut's claim, at the beginning of the Revolution, was the zone 
lying between parallels 41° and 42° 2' north latitude, and 
Massachusetts's, the zone north of this to the parallel of three 
miles beyond the inflow of Lake Winnipiseogee in New 
Hampshire ; both claims extending from the Delaware and 
the line thereof to the Mississippi. Connecticut's claim was 
largely reduced by the Trenton decision of 1782; but this 
in no way affected her rights west of Pennsylvania. It was 
urged that these claims were barred west of the present west- 



' Journals of Congress, IV., 21, 22. ' History, III., 399. 

^ Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 125. 

13 



194 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ern limits of these States: (i) By the words, " actually pos- 
sessed and occupied by a Christian people or prince," found 
in the Plymouth charter of 1620, because they related to the 
lands west of the Dutch settlements ; (2) by the presence of 
the Dutch on the Hudson in 1620, 1629, and 1662 ; (3) by 
the grant to the Duke of York ; (4) by the boundary-settle- 
ment of 1733 ; (5) by the grant to Penn in 168 1 ; and (6) by 
New York's Iroquois title. Stress was also laid on the old 
argument against the from sea-to-sea grants ; viz., they were 
made in ignorance of geography, and included vast tracts of 
land that did not, at the time, belong to the English Crown. 
The most important of these points were sustained by Attor- 
ney-General Pratt in 1761, who also held that there were 
State reasons for deciding the Wyoming controversy in favor 
of Pennsylvania; but Thurlow, and the other Crown lawyers 
consulted by Connecticut, held that the reservation made in 
the charter of 1620 did " not extend to lands on the west side 
of the Dutch settlements ; " that the Plymouth grant did not 
mean to except in favor of anyone anything to the westward 
of such plantations; that the agreement of 1733 between 
Connecticut and New York extended " no further than to 
settle the boundaries between the respective parties," and 
" had no effect upon other claims that either of them had in 
other parts ; " and that as the charter to Connecticut was 
granted but eighteen years before that to Penn, there was " no 
ground to contend that the Crown could, at that period, 
make an effective grant to him of that country which had 
been so recently granted to others," ' 

The two New England claims rested on substantially the 
same foundation ; but it is curious to note how differently 
they were treated east of the western limits of Pennsylvania 
and New York. A Federal court threw the one claim aside 
as invalid, while the State of New York virtually conceded 



' Hoyt gives the substance of the two opinions : Title in the Seventeen Town» 
ships in the County of Luzerne, 32, 33. 



THE NORTHWESTERN LAND-CLAIMS. 195 

the validity of the other in her compromise with Massachu- 
setts in 1786. 

The report of the committee on the national limits made 
August 16, 1782, assigns the treaties of 1684, 1701, 1726, 1744, 
and 1754, with the Six Nations, as the sources of New York's 
title to the West.' The report of January 8th on the same 
subject speaks of the royal geographer, in a map describing 
and distinguishing the British, Spanish, and French dominions 
in America according to the treaty of 1763, as carrying the 
States of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Vir- 
ginia as far as the Mississippi. ° Some maps of that period, it 
may be added, do carry the east and west lines of these States 
as far as the great river ; others carry them no farther than 
the mountains ; but all maps making any pretentions to thor- 
oughness lay down the lines of the royal proclamation. 

Such were the Northwestern land-claims that, for many 
years, were a foremost question of domestic polity. Practi- 
cally they were not heard of until the time came for the 
American column to pass the Endless Mountains and take 
possession of the Great West. And, strange to say consider- 
ing the vehemence with which they were afterward disputed, 
the first time they were brought before a Congress of the 
Colonies they met with a unanimous approval. 

Note. — These are the resolutions in which the Albany Con- 
gress set its seal to the claims in 1754. 

" That His Majesty's title to the northern continent of 
America appears to be founded on the discovery thereof first 
made, and the possession thereof first taken in 1497, under a 
commission from Henry the Seventh of England to Sebastian 
Cabot : That the French have possessed themselves of several 
parts of this continent, which by treaties have been ceded and 
confirmed to them. 

"That the right of the English to the whole sea-coast from 
Georgia on the south, to the river St. Lawrence on the north, 



Secret Journals, III., 168. ''Ibid., III., 154. 



196 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

excepting the Island of Cape Breton, and the Islands in the bay 
of St. Lawrence remains indisputable : 

"That all the lands or countries westward from the Atlantic 
Ocean to the South Sea, between 48 and 34 degrees north lati- 
tude, was expressly included in the grant of King Charles the 
First to divers of his subjects, so long since as the year 1606, 
and afterwards confirmed in 1620, and under this grant the 
colony of Virginia claims extent as far west as the South Sea, 
and the ancient colonies of the Massachusetts Bay and Con- 
necticut, were by their respective charters made to extend to 
the said South Sea ; so that not only the right to the sea-coast, 
but all the inland countries from sea to sea, has at all times 
been asserted by the crown of England : 

"That the bounds of those colonies, which extend to the 
South Seas, be contracted and limited by the Alleghany or 
Appalachian mountains ; and that measures be taken for settling 
from time to time, colonies of his Majesty's Protestant subjects 
west of said mountains, in convenient cantons to be assigned 
for that purpose ; and finally, that there be a union of his Maj- 
esty's several governments on the continent, that so their coun- 
cils, treasures, and strength, mav be employed in due propor- 
tion against their common enemy." 



XII. 
THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS.— (I.) 

The United States and the States taken together might 
possibly have continued conterminous until the Louisiana an- 
nexation in 1803, provided all the States had been bounded 
on the west by the Mississippi River. But such was not the 
case. New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Dela- 
ware, and Maryland were all confined to the Atlantic Plain, 
and Pennsylvania did not extend far beyond the Forks of the 
Ohio ; while the seven remaining States claimed the whole 
West, from the Florida line to the Lakes, and some of it two 
and even three times over. The division of the States into 
the two classes, in connection with the nature of the war, 
made the Western lands an inevitable issue. The claimant 
States were more numerous, more populous, and more wealthy 
than the non-claimant States, not to speak of their territorial 
superiority ; they also stood on the plain federal principle 
that the Confederation was the States confederated ; but they 
could not prevent the issue being raised or prevent its going 
against them in the end. Before the boundaries of 1783 
were agreed upon. Congress had adopted a policy that ul- 
timately gave the jurisdiction of the West, and a large part of 
the lands, to the nation ; and we are now to follow the de- 
velopment of this policy so far as it relates to our subject. 

On October 14, 1777, Congress adopted the following rule 
for supplying the treasury of the United States : 

" All charges of war and all other expenses that shall be 
incurred for the common defence or general welfare, and al- 



198 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

lowed by the United States in Congress assembled, shall be 
defrayed out of a common treasury which shall be supplied by 
the several states, in proportion to the value of all land within 
each state granted to, or surveyed for, any person, as such 
land and the buildings and improvements thereon shall be esti- 
mated according to such mode as the United States in Con- 
gress assembled shall from time to time direct and appoint." ' 

This rule, which left the States wholly free to raise the 
supplies for the treasury in their own way, was made a part 
of Article VIIL of the Articles of Confederation. The vote 
on this rule does not appear to have been influenced by the 
land-issue. That issue was first raised the following day, 
when this proposition, submitted no doubt by one of the 
delegates from that State, received the single vote of Mary- 
land : 

" That the United States in Congress assembled shall have 
the sole and exclusive right and power to ascertain and fix the 
western boundary of such states as claim to the Mississippi or 
the South Sea, and lay out the land beyond the boundary so ascer- 
tained into separate and independent states, frotn time to time, as the 
numbers and circumstances of the people thereof may require." 

Because this was the first proposition " that Congress should 
exercise sovereign jurisdiction over the Western country," 
Prof. H. B. Adams calls it a " pioneer thought. ^ " In one re- 
spect it is a very different thought from that which finally 
prevailed. The proposition was really double — an end to be 
gained and a means of gaining it. The end was national 
jurisdiction over the Western lands ; the means, the assertion 
of this jurisdiction by Congress, no more attention being paid 
to the claimant than to the non-claimant States. It was a 

' The history of the Confederation in Congress is found in the Secret Jour- 
nals of Congress, I., 283 et seq. The citations will be found under the appro- 
priate dates. 

' Maryland's Innuence upon Land Cessions to the United States, 23. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 199 

plain proposition to nationalize the lands. The end was the 
highest statesmanship ; but if Congress had adopted the 
means of reaching it proposed by Maryland, it is reasonably 
certain that the Confederation and the patriot cause would 
have been hopelessly wrecked. 

Scenting danger, the claimant States, October 27th, caused 
a declaration to be incorporated in the Articles that the 
United States in Congress assembled should be the last re- 
sort, on appeal, in all disputes and differences between two 
or more States concerning boundaries, jurisdiction, or any 
other cause whatever, with an elaborate machinery for the 
exercise of such jurisdiction. The amendment closed with 
this bulwark against " pioneer thoughts," or other encroach- 
ments, on the Western preserves : " No State shall be de- 
prived of territory for the benefit of the United States." 
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Vir- 
ginia, and North Carolina voted for the amendment ; New 
Hampshire voted against it ; New Jersey and South Carolina 
were divided ; Maryland and Georgia were not present or 
voting ; and Connecticut was not counted, as but one mem- 
ber was present. 

Within a month of the time that Maryland brought for- 
ward her " pioneer thought," the Congress had perfected the 
Articles of Confederation ; and November 17, 1777, they 
were sent out to the States, with a circular letter recommend- 
ing that they empower their delegates in Congress to ratify 
them in their name and behalf. 

Some of the legislatures promptly gave their delegates 
such instructions, and some hesitated. A number of amend- 
ments to the Articles were proposed, and of these several re- 
lated to the land-question.' One of those that came from 
Maryland was a virtual renewal of the proposition of the year 
before, but in a somewhat less emphatic form. Rhode Island, 



' All the amendments proposed may be found in the Secret Journals, I., un- 
der June 22, 23, 1778, 



200 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, all non- 
claimant States, voted for this amendment ; New Hampshire, 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and South Carolina, all 
claimant States but the first, voted against it ; New York 
was divided ; North Carolina and Georgia were not present 
or voting. Rhode Island submitted the following amend- 
ment, which was also lost, nine votes to one : 

" That all lands within these States, the property of which, 
before the present war, was vested in the Crown of Great Brit- 
ain, or out of which revenues from quit rents arise payable to 
the said Crown, shall be deemed, taken, and considered as the 
property of these United States, and be disposed of and ap- 
propriated by Congress for the benefit of the whole Confed- 
eracy, reserving, however, to the States, within whose limits 
such Crown lands may be, the entire and complete jurisdiction 
thereof." 

New Jersey laid before Congress a lengthy " representa- 
tion," in which she stated, though not in the form of amend- 
ments, her views on various provisions of the Articles. This 
document touched the land-issue at two points: (i) "The 
boundaries and limits of each State ought to be fully and 
finally fixed and made known;" and if circumstances did not 
admit of this being done before the Articles were ratified 
and went into effect, then it should be done afterward, not 
exceeding five years from the final ratification of the Confeder- 
ation. (2) It was urged that the war was undertaken for the 
general defence of the confederating States ; that the benefits 
derived from a successful contest should be general and pro- 
portionate ; that the property of the common enemy, acquired 
during the war, should belong to the United States and be 
appropriated to their use ; that the Articles of Confederation 
should empower Congress to dispose of such property, and es- 
pecially the vacant and unpatented lands, commonly called 
the " Crown Lands," for defraying the expenses of the war, and 
for other general purposes; but that the jurisdiction ought, in 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 201 

every instance, to belong to the respective States within the 
charter or determined limits of which such lands may be 
seated. These recommendations were voted down, receiving 
but three votes to six against them. 

None of the amendments proposed by the States received 
much consideration ; they were voted down one and all, in the 
apparent belief that the surest and quickest way to complete 
the Confederation was to adhere to the Articles as originally 
adopted. It is clear, however, that the opposition to the land- 
claims of the claimant States was broadening and deepening. 
At the same time, we must not overlook the difference be- 
tween the " pioneer thought " brought forward by Maryland 
in 1777 and the propositions now submitted by Rhode Island 
and New Jersey. The first was that the United States in 
Congress assembled should assert jurisdiction over the West- 
ern lands ; the others were, that the lands, or parts of them, 
should be disposed of for the benefit of all the States, or of the 
nation as a unit, not disturbing the jurisdiction. 

The Confederation had now been fully ratified by eight 
States, and of the five others. North Carolina had empowered 
her delegates to do so. The four that had not ratified were 
Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Georgia. To these 
Congress, on July 10, 1778, sent a circular letter, urging them 
to instruct their delegates to ratify " with all convenient des- 
patch," putting forward as the one conclusive argument that 
Congress had " never ceased to consider a confederacy as the 
great principle of union, which can alone establish the liberty 
of America, and elude forever the hopes of its enemies." 
Future deliberations should be trusted to make such alterations 
and amendments as experience might show to be expedient 
and just. Georgia responded to this appeal at once, and New 
Jersey soon followed. 

In the act empowering her delegates to ratify the Articles, 
the legislature of New Jersey reaffirmed that they would, in 
diverse particulars, be unequal and disadvantageous to that 
State, but that she was willing, in reliance on the justice and 



202 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

candor of the several States, to surrender her State interest to 
the general good of the Union.' On February 22, 1779, the 
Delaware delegates ratified the Articles in behalf of that 
State, and theday following laid before Congress some resolu- 
tions which the Delaware Council had adopted, asserting that 
moderate limits shotdd be assigned to the States claiming to 
the Mississippi ; that Congress should have the power of fix- 
ing those limits ; also that Delaware was justly entitled to a 
right, in common with the other members of the Union, to the 
lands westward of the frontiers, the property of which was 
vested in individual States at the beginning of the war, but 
that ought now " to be a common estate to be granted out on 
terms beneficial to the United States," since they have been 
or must be gained by the blood and treasure of all. Congress 
received and filed this paper, but declared " that it should 
never be considered as admitting any claim by the same set 
up or intended to be set up." 

The ratification of Delaware left Maryland standing soli- 
tary and alone ; but she still refused her ratification as 
stoutly as ever. Moreover, she refused it on the sole ground 
that she defined in the amendment Article proposed October 
^5j ^ni- As her assent alone was wanting to complete the 
Confederation, Maryland felt compelled to justify herself to 
Congress and to her sister States, In fact, she had already 
taken the first steps in that direction before Delaware's final 
assent to the Articles was given. 

On December 15, 1778, the Maryland Legislature adopted 
a " declaration," stating her objections to the policy touching 
the Western lands thus far pursued. It was declared funda- 
mentally wrong and repugnant to every principle of equity 
and good policy that Maryland, or any other State entering 
into the Confederation, should be burdened with heavy ex- 
penses for the subduing and guaranteeing of immense tracts of 
country, if she is not in any way to be benefited thereby. 



' The Secret Journals, IV., 422. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 203 

Maryland will ratify the Confederation when it is so amended 
as to give full power to Congress to ascertain and fix the west- 
ern limits of the States claiming to extend to the Mississippi, 
and expressly to reserve to the United States a right in com- 
mon in and to all the lands lying to the westward of the 
frontiers as thus fixed, not granted to, or surveyed for, or pur- 
chased by individuals at the commencement of the war. 
Further, the exclusive claim set up by some States to the 
whole Western country is declared to be without any solid 
foundation ; and it will, if submitted to, prove ruinous to 
Maryland and to other States similarly circumstanced, and, 
in process of time, be the means of subverting the Confeder- 
acy.* This document, which was intended to influence public 
opinion as well as Congress, was brought forward in Con- 
gress, January 6, 1779; but a longer and more earnest one, 
adopted by the General Assembly on the same day, entitled 
" Instructions to the Maryland Delegates," was not presented 
until May 2ist.^ The two documents are the defence of her 
position that Maryland made to the country. 

The " instructions " assume that some of the States have 
acceded to the Confederation from dread of immediate ca- 
lamities growing out of the war and other peculiar circum- 
stances, and thatj'when these causes cease to operate, said States 
Avill consider it no longer binding, but will improve the first 
favorable opportunity to assert their just rights and secure 
their independence. The Western lands, if the course marked 
out is persisted in, will present such an opportunity. The 
same grasping spirit that leads the claimant States "to insist 
on a claim so extravagant, so repugnant to every principle of 
justice, so incompatible with the general welfare of the States, 
will urge them on to add oppression to injustice." The de- 
population and impoverishment of the non-claimant States, 



' This declaration, with other important papers relating to the same subject, 
is found in Hening's Statutes of Virginia, X., 546 et seq. 
- Found in the Secret Journals, under this date. 



204 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



if not their oppression by open force, will follow. The prob- 
able consequences to Maryland of the undisputed possession 
by Virginia of the Western country that she claimed are thus 
vigorously described : 

"Virginia, by selling on the most moderate terms a small 
proportion of the lands in question, would draw into her treas- 
ury vast sums of money ; and in proportion to the sums arising 
from such sales, would be enabled to lessen her taxes. Lands 
comparatively cheap, and taxes comparatively low, with the 
lands and taxes of an adjacent state, would quickly drain the 
State thus disadvantageously circumstanced of its most useful 
inhabitants ; its wealth and its consequence in the scale of the 
confederated States would sink of course. A claim so injurious 
to more than one-half, if not to the whole of the United States, 
ought to be supported by the clearest evidence of the right. 
Yet what evidences of that right have been produced ? What 
arguments alleged in support either of tlie evidence or the 
right ? None that we have heard of deserving a serious refuta- 
tion." 

To the argument that some of the States were too large 
for one practicable government, and that it would be found 
necessary to divide them into two States even if the Articles 
stood as 'they were, it was replied that, for a State to divide 
its territory to erect under its auspices and direction a new 
State, upon which it would impose its own form of govern- 
ment, binding the new State to itself by some alliance or con- 
federacy, and influencing its councils, thus forming a sub-con- 
federacy, iinpcrijiui in ivipcrio, would certainly be opposed by 
the other States as inconsistent with the letter and spirit of 
the proposed Confederation. Moreover, if these States con- 
template such a policy, why insist now upon the territories 
that they intend to surrender ? But two motives can be as- 
signed. Either the suggestion is made to lull suspicion and 
to cover the designs of the secret coalition, or the purpose is 
to reap an immediate profit from the sale of the lands. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 205 

The Maryland proposition as presented in 1777 is then re- 
affirmed, and the Maryland delegates are instructed not to 
ratify the Confederation unless an amendment be added in 
conformity with that view ; but should the delegates succeed 
in obtaining such an amendment, then they are fully empow- 
ered to ratify it. The document closes with a fervent hope 
that Congress may be led by these arguments to amend the 
Articles in such a manner as to bring about a permanent 
union. 

The fallacy that there is value in wild lands appears to 
have been universally accepted in Congress and the States 
in Revolutionary days. It was constantly assumed that the 
Western lands, when sold, would enormously enrich the claim- 
ant States or the Nation, as the case might be ; while experi- 
ence has proved, in this case as in many others, that the man 
who subdues such land " can," as Professor \V, G. Sumner 
puts it, " only afford to give a remuneration for the survey 
which secures him a definite description and identification of 
the land which he has appropriated, and for the authority of 
a civil government which protects his title." ' In the long 
run, the national Government has not found the public do- 
main a source of revenue. 

The economical arguments so warmly urged by the non- 
claimant States were, therefore, next to worthless. Besides, 
the most weighty political arguments in favor of nationalizing 
the lands were practically overlooked, or at least not carried 
out to their results. 

As the Articles were Articles of Confederation and Per- 
petual Union among thirteen States, the ratifications of the 
twelve did not give them force and effect even over the 
twelve. Maryland refused to close the circle, and her refusal 
was followed by very serious results. The machinery that 



' Andrew Jackson as a Public Man. — Professor Sumner says (p. 185) : " Down 
to September 30, 1832, the lands had cost $49.7 million and the total revenue 
received from them had amounted to $38.2 million." 



206 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the Articles furnished for filling the treasury and recruiting 
the army could not be set in motion ; the domestic and for- 
eign enemies of the national cause were elated at the appear- 
ance of serious dissensions among the States ; and the friends 
of the cause were correspondingly depressed. 

Virginia now prepared practically to assert her claim to 
the lands west of the Alleghany Mountains. In May, 1779, 
the very month that the Maryland instructions were read to 
Congress, her legislature passed an act directing the opening 
of a land-oflfice the ensuing October, and fixing the terms on 
which lands should be sold ; and, about the same time, a sec- 
ond act, regulating the land-patents issued by royal authority 
to the Virginia officers and troops in the French and Indian 
War. The meaning of the two acts was unmistakable : Vir- 
ginia proposed to disregard the growing sentiment in favor 
of endowing the United States with the Western lands. To 
her surprise she immediately called into activity a power that 
had been sleeping since the beginning of the war ; the range 
of controversy was at once widened, and the way to agree- 
ment prepared by increasing the confusion. 

On September 14, 1779, a memorial signed by George 
Morgan in behalf of certain land claimants was read in 
Congress. This memorial recited : That at the Indian Con- 
gress held at Fort Stanwix in 1768, in consideration of the 
loss of some ^^85,000 sustained by certain traders, the Six 
Nations granted a tract of land, lying on the southern side 
of the Ohio between the southern limit of Pennsylvania and 
the Little Kanawha River, called Indiana ; that afterward, but 
before the war began, this tract of land, as included within 
the bounds of a larger tract called Vandalia, was by the King 
in Council separated from the dominion which, in right of the 
Crown, Virginia claimed over it ; that, as the memorialists 
are advised, the said tract is not subject to the jurisdiction of 
Virginia or any particular State, but of the United States ; 
and that the action of Virginia directing the sale of the lands 
in question seems intended to defeat the interposition of Con- 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 20/ 

gress. Hence, the memorialists pray Congress to take such 
speedy action as shall arrest the sale of the lands until Vir- 
ginia and the memorialists can be heard by Congress, and the 
rights of the owners of the tract called Vandalia, of which 
Indiana is a part, shall be ascertained, in such a manner as may 
tend to support the sovereignty of the United States and the 
just rights of individuals. A memorial signed by William 
Trent, in behalf of Thomas Walpole and his associates in the 
Grand Company, was presented at the same time.' New 
Plampshire, Massachusetts, Virginia, and both the Carolinas 
voted against the motion to refer the Morgan memorial to a 
committee, but the motion prevailed. Messrs. Witherspoon, 
Jenifer, Atlee, Sherman, and Peabody, on October 8th, were 
appointed said committee. The Trent memorial had the 
same reference. It should be observed that, when the me- 
morials were introduced, the \Mrginia delegates objected that 
Congress had no jurisdiction over their subject-matter. The 
committee was also instructed to inquire into the foundation 
of this objection, and first to report the facts relating to that 
point. This action is evidence that Congress was prepared at 
least to inquire whether the Nation had any title to lands 
in the West. 

On October 29, 1779, the committee reported that they 
had considered the facts presented to them by the Virginia 
delegates ; and that they " could not find any such distinc- 
tion between the question of the jurisdiction of Congress 
and the merits of the cause as to recommend any decision 
upon the first separately from the last." The next day a pre- 
amble and resolution offered by the Maryland delegates, but 
somewhat amended, was adopted as follows : 

" Whereas, the appropriation of vacant lands by the several 
states during the continuance of the war will, in the opinion of 
Congress, be attended with great mischiefs ; therefore, 

' The Morgan memorial is found in the Journals of Congress, III., 359. The 
Trent memorial is not found in the Journals at all. 



2o8 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" Resolved, That it be earnestly recommended to the State of 
Virginia to reconsider their late act of assembly for opening 
their land office ; and that it be recommended to the said State, 
and all other States, similarly circumstanced, to forbear set- 
tling or issuing warrants for unappropriated lands, or granting 
the same during the continuance of the present war." ' 

Virginia and North Carolina are the only States that 
voted in the negative, but New York was divided. This 
action at once shifted the onus from Maryland to Virginia. 
The Old Dominion was now compelled to speak. On Decem- 
ber 14, 1779, her legislature addressed to the delegates of the 
United States in Congress assembled a " remonstrance " of 
which these are the leading points: (i) That Virginia has al- 
ready enacted a law to prevent further settlements on the 
northwest banks of the Ohio River; (2) that Virginia learns 
with surprise and concern that Congress has received and 
countenanced petitions from the Indiana and Vandalia Com- 
panies asserting claims to lands within her limits as claimed ; 
and that for Congress to assume a jurisdiction and right of 
adjudication such as granting these petitions would imply, 
would be contrary to the fundamental principles of the Con- 
federation, would introduce a most dangerous precedent which 
might be urged to deprive one or more of the States of terri- 
tory, or subvert its sovereignty and government, and establish 
in Congress a power which would degenerate into an intoler- 
able despotism; (3) that there are many other land-companies 
than those that have already petitioned Congress, claiming 
lands in the West, repugnant to Virginia's laws ; and that 
listening with consideration to the Indiana and Vandalia Com- 
panies will encourage these to bring forward their claims ; (4) 
Congress have stated their ultimatum as to boundaries in their 
terms of peace (in the instructions to Mr. Adams, mentioned 
in a previous chapter). " The United States hold no terri- 



' Journals of Congress, III., 385. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 209 

tory but in right of some one individual State in the Union ; 
the territory of each State from time immemorial hath been 
fixed and determined by their respective charters, there being 
no other rule or criterion to judge by." The setting aside of 
this rule will end in bloodshed among the States. " Nor can 
any argument be fairly urged to prove that any particular 
tract of country within the limits claimed by Congress on be- 
half of the United States, not part of the chartered territory 
of some one of them, but must militate with equal force 
against the right of the United States in general ; and tend 
to prove that tract of country (if northwest of the Ohio 
River) part of the British Province of Canada ; " (5) the limits 
of Virginia are defined in her constitution of 1776; (6) Vir- 
ginia is ready to listen to any just and reasonable proposition 
for removing the ostensible causes of delay to the complete rat- 
ification of the Confederation^referring, of course, to Mary- 
land. Virginia is now ready, as she has before declared herself 
ready, to furnish lands northwest of the Ohio to the troops 
on the Continental establishment of such of the States as have 
not unappropriated lands for that purpose ; but she solemnly 
"protests against any jurisdiction or right of adjudication in 
Congress upon the petitions of the Vandalia or Indiana 
Companies, or any other matter or thing subversive of the 
internal policy, civil government, or sovereignty of this or 
any other of the United American States, as unwarranted by 
the Articles of Confederation." ^ 

Firm as is the tone of the remonstrance, it is plain that 
Virginia is becoming more yielding and pliable. 

Particular attention should be drawn to the bearing of the 
question with which we are dealing on the national boun- 
daries. Virginia states the point with great force in her re- 
monstrance ; and it is perfectly clear, in the light of the facts 
already presented, that a denial of the Western titles on 
the ground that the Western lands belonged to the Crown, 



' Ilening's Statutes of Virginia, X. 
14 



210 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tended to subvert the very foundation on which Congress 
instructed its foreign representatives to stand while contend- 
ing with England, France, and Spain for a westward extension 
to the Mississippi. Accordingly, the Maryland doctrine was 
a dangerous one ; it left no standing ground on which to con- 
tend for the Western country but that of conquest and occu- 
pancy. But Congress wisely kept wide of the Maryland path 
leading to the Maryland goal, and eventually worked out a 
solution of the Western question on the principle of com- 
promise and concession. 

The first practical step toward a solution of the question 
was taken by the State of New York. On January 17, 1780, 
her legislature passed an " Act for facilitating the completion 
of the Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union among 
the United States of America." After reciting the desirabil- 
ity of a more perfect Union, the dissatisfaction of some States 
with the Articles, growing out of the waste lands, and the de- 
sire of New York to accelerate the Union by removing, as far 
as possible, this impediment, the legislature provides: (i) 
That the delegates of the State in Congress, or the majority 
of them, are authorized and empowered, in behalf of the State, 
to limit and restrict its boundaries in the western parts by 
such line or lines, and in such manner and form, as they shall 
judge, to be expedient, with respect either to the jurisdiction 
or the right of soil, or both ; (2) that the territory so ceded 
shall be and inure for the use and benefit of such of the 
United States as shall become members of the federal alli- 
ance of the said States, and for no other use or purpose what- 
ever ; (3) that such of the lands, so ceded, as shall remain 
within the jurisdiction of the State, shall be surveyed, laid 
out, and disposed of only as Congress may direct. 

Virtually this act was the first of the cessions. It imme- 
diately changed the whole situation. Henceforth, the claim- 
ant States were compelled to justify themselves to Congress 
and the country for not following New York's example. 
Moreover, the act is remarkable for the large powers with 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 21 1 

which it clothed the New York delegates in Congress, mak- 
ing them the sole judges whether the boundaries of the State 
should be restricted, and, if so, what should be the manner 
and the extent of the restriction. This act was the result of 
a growing conviction that the Western country ought not to 
belong solely to the seven claimant States, and, also, of the 
growth of national ideas. Professor Adams seeks to prove 
that it was the distinct result of Maryland's influence, and his 
argument, whether wholly conclusive or not, contains some 
valuable information, chiefly drawn from a letter written by 
General Philip Schuyler, then a delegate in Congress, to 
the New York Legislature, which immediately preceded the 
Facilitating Act.^ 

On September 6, 1780, a committee to whom all the 
documents in relation to the subject, accumulated on the 
table, had been referred, submitted a report on which the 
final issue turned. 

" That having duly considered the several matters to them 
submitted, they conceive it unnecessary to examine into the 
merits or policy of the instructions or declaration of the gener- 
al assembly of Maryland, or of the remonstrance of the gener- 
al assembly of Virginia, as they involve questions, a discussion 
of which was declined, on mature consideration, when the ar- 
ticles of confederation were debated ; nor, in the opinion of the 
committee, can such questions be now revived with any pros- 
pect of conciliation : That it appears more advisable, to press 
upon those states which can remove the embarrassments re- 
specting the western country, a liberal surrender of a portion 
of their territorial claims, since they cannot be preserved entire 
without endangering the stability of the general confederacy ; 
to remind them how indispensably necessary it is to establish 
the federal union on a fixed and permanent basis, and on prin- 
ciples acceptable to all its respective members ; how essential 
to public credit and confidence, to the support of the army, to 

* Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to the United States, 30 et seq. 



212 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the vigor of our councils, and success of our measures, to our 
tranquillity at home, our reputation abroad, to our very exist- 
ence as a free, sovereign, and independent people ; that they are 
fully persuaded the wisdom of the respective legislatures will 
lead them to a full and impartial consideration of a subject so 
interesting to the United States, and so necessary to the happy 
establishment of the federal union ; that they are confirmed in 
these expectations by a review of the before-mentioned act of 
the legislature of New York, submitted to their consideration ; 
that this act is expressly calculated to accelerate the federal al- 
liance by removing, as far as depends on that state, the impedi- 
ment arising from the western country, and for that purpose to 
yield up a portion of territorial claim for the general benefit ; 

" Resolved, That copies of the several papers referred to the 
committee be transmitted, with a copy of the report, to the leg- 
islatures of the several states ; and that it be earnestly recom- 
mended to these states who have claims to the western country 
to pass such laws, and give their delegates in Congress such 
powers, as may effectually remove the only obstacle to a final 
ratification of the articles of confederation : and that the legis- 
lature of Maryland be earnestly requested to authorize their 
delegates in Congress to subscribe the articles." ' 

This report was agreed to without call of the roll. Its 
adoption marks a memorable day in the history of the land- 
controversy. No other document extant shows so clearly the 
wise policy that Congress adopted. That policy was neither 
to affirm nor to deny, nor even to discuss, whether Congress 
had jurisdiction over the wild lands, but to ask for cessions 
and to trust the logic of events to work out the issue. The ap- 
peal made to Maryland was one that she could not well refuse 
to heed. And then, that nothing but selfish interest might 
stand in the way of the other claimant States following the 
example of New York, Congress adopted, October loth, this 
further resolution : 



Journals of Congress, III., 516, 517, 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 213 

^^ Resolved, That the unappropriated lands that may be ceded 
or relinquished to the United States, by any particular state, 
pursuant to the recommendation of Congress of the sixth day 
of September last, shall be disposed of for the common .benefit 
of the United States, and be settled and formed into distinct 
republican states, which shall become members of the federal 
union, and have the same rights of sovereignty, freedom and 
independence as the other states : That each state which shall 
be so formed shall have a suitable extent of territory, not less 
than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles 
square, as near thereto as circumstances will admit : That the 
necessary and reasonable expenses which any particular state 
shall have incurred since the commencement of the present war, 
in subduing any British posts, or in maintaining forts or garri- 
sons within and for the defence, or in acquiring any part of 
the territory that may be ceded or relinquished to the United 
States, shall be reimbursed ; 

That the said lands shall be granted or settled at such times 
and under such regulations as shall hereafter be agreed on by 
the United States in Congress assembled, or any nine or more 
of them," ' 

The offer to reimburse the reasonable expenses that any 
State had incurred in subduing any British posts, etc., was, in 
substance, a proposition to reimburse Virginia for the cost of 
the George Rogers Clark expedition. 

The papers sent to the claimant States under the resolu- 
tion of September 6th called out immediate responses. Con- 
necticut replied by a legislative act, October loth, offering a 
cession of lands within her charter-limits, west of the Sus- 
quehanna purchase and east of the Mississippi, on condition 
that the State retain the jurisdiction, the quantity of land so 
ceded to be " in just proportion of what shall be ceded and re- 
linquished by the other States claiming and holding vacant 
lands as aforesaid with the quantity of such their claim un- 

' The Journals of Congress, III., 585. 



214 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

appropriated at the time when the Congress of the United 
States was first convened and held at Philadelphia." The 
preamble of this act explains that its enactment was due to 
the anxiety of the State to promote the liberty and indepen- 
dence of " this rising empire." 

Virginia was the next State to resjDond. On January 2, 
1 78 1, her legislature resolved to yield to Congress, for the 
benefit of the United States, all the right, title, and claim 
which Virginia had to the lands northwest of the River Ohio, 
upon eight conditions. The seventh of these conditions was, 
that all purchases and deeds from any Indian or Indians, for 
any lands within the cession made for the use of any private 
person or persons, as well as grants inconsistent with the 
chartered rights of Virginia, should be deemed and declared 
absolutely void, in the same manner as if the said territory 
had still remained part of the commonwealth of Virginia. 
The last condition was that all the remaining territory of Vir- 
ginia, enclosed between the Atlantic Ocean and the southeast 
side of the River Ohio, and the Maryland, Pennsylvania, and 
North Carolina boundaries, should be guaranteed to Virginia 
by the United States. Plainly, these two conditions, if agreed 
to, would involve a declaration of the validity of Virginia's 
claim to the Northwest, and a ruling out of the claims of 
New York, if not of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and so 
be a departure from the policy that Congress had thus far 
pursued.' In the year or more that elapsed before Congress 
replied to this overture, some very important things were 
done. 

On February 2, 1781, the Maryland Legislature empow- 
ered the Maryland delegates in Congress to subscribe and 
ratify the Articles of Confederation. The preamble of the 
act recites the reasons why the circle of the Confederation 
should be closed, and declares the devotion of Maryland to 
the common cause. The act also declares that the State 



'Journals of Congress, IV., 265, 266. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 215 

does not, by acceding to the Confederation, relinquish any- 
right or interest that she had, with the other States, in the 
back country. She still stands on the declaration of 1778; 
but she relies on the justice of the States hereafter as to the 
said claim. Further, she says no Article in the Confederation 
can bind INIaryland, or any other State, to guarantee any ex- 
clusive claim of any particular State to the soil of the back 
lands. This act was read in Congress on the 12th of the same 
month, ^ and preparations were made for the immediate con- 
summation of the Confederation. 

Messrs. Duane, Floyd, and McDougal, the New York dele- 
gates, now prepared a deed of limitation, in the name of the 
State, ceding to the United States all her right, title, interest, 
jurisdiction, and claim to all lands and territories northward of 
the forty-fifth parallel of north latitude and westward of a 
meridian line drawn through the western bent or inclination 
of Lake Ontario, or westward of a meridian line twenty miles 
west of the most westerly bent of the Niagara River, 
provided the former meridian should not be found to fall 
that distance beyond said river. At the same time, the New 
York delegates prepared another paper, that they named an 
" act or declaration," calling attention to the guarantee that 
Virginia asked for the territory she did not offer to cede ; 
asserting that it was unjust to ask New York 'to guarantee the 
territories that other States making cessions reserved, at the 
same time that she was herself making large cessions of lands 
and receiving no guarantee for those she did not cede ; and 
declaring, therefore, that the deed of cession was not absolute, 
but, on the contrary, should be subject to ratification or dis- 
avowal by the people of the State, represented in the legis- 
lature, at their pleasure, unless the territories reserved for 
the future jurisdiction of New York should be guaranteed by 
the United States in the same manner as the territories of 
other States making cessions of lands were guaranteed. 

' See Journals of Congress, under that date. 



2l6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

On March i, 1781, two important transactions were con. 
summated. Messrs. Duane, Floyd, and McDougal exe- 
cuted, in the nanne of New York, the deed of limitation and 
the " act or declaration ; " and John Hanson and Daniel Car- 
roll, delegates in behalf of the State of Maryland, signed and 
ratified the Articles of Confederation, " by which act [so runs 
the " Journal "] the Confederation of the United States of 
America was completed, each and every of the Thirteen 
United States, from New Hampshire to Georgia, both in- 
cluded, having adopted and confirmed, and by their delegates 
in Congress ratified the same." Congress had anticipated this 
auspicious event by providing that the completion of the Con- 
federation should be announced to the public at noon of that 
day ; that the Boards of War and of Admiralty should take 
order accordingly ; that information be communicated to the 
executives of the several States; that the American ministers 
abroad be informed, and that they be instructed to notify the 
respective courts at which they resided ; that information be 
given to the honorable the minister plenipotentiary of France ; 
that information be transmitted to the commander-in-chief, 
and that he announce the same to the army under his com- 
mand. We now note a change in the style of the " Journals 
of Congress." On and after March 2, 1781, the style is, "The 
United- States in Congress Assembled." 

That Maryland had not theoretically abandoned her old 
ground is proved by the Act of February 2, 1781 ; that she 
had not abandoned it practically, is proved by the history 
thus far recited. The Connecticut and Virginia cessions were 
far from satisfactory either to Maryland or to Congress, but 
they were an earnest of what might, in time, be looked for. 
The resolutions of September and October, 1780, proved con- 
clusively the drift of national sentiment. The New York 
cession arrayed that great State on the side of the small 
States, and was an example that the other claimant States 
could not long refuse to follow. So much had been gained 
that Maryland could well afford to close the circle of the Con- 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 217 

federation, "relying on the justice of the several States here- 
after " to dedicate the Western lands to the Nation. The com- 
l)Ietion of the Confederation took away the great argument 
hitherto relied upon in favor of the limitation-policy ; and 
henceforth, the strong appeal addressed to the claimant States 
is the needs of the treasury. 

In an able article, Professor Alexander Johnston says the 
provision of the national Constitution " for the admission of 
new States was the result of State experience only. All the 
States had experienced the British system of treating colonies 
as mere creatures of an omnipotent Parliament ; and they had 
been determined that their territories should be treated in a 
different way, as inchoate States. The Constitution's provi- 
sion had its origin in the Congress of the Confederation. It 
is to the Ordinance of 1787, not to the Convention of that 
year, that Ave must look for the conception of this powerful 
factor in our peculiar national development ; and the Con- 
gress of the Confederation took it, not from creative genius, 
but from the natural growth of State feeling.'" There is, in- 
deed, a wide difference between dependent colonies and in- 
dependent States. Mr. Bancroft's felicitous chapter, " The 
Colonial System of the United States," does not bear a felici- 
tous name. Professor Johnston's praise of this feature of the 
Constitution is well deserved ; but its ultimate source is the 
" pioneer thought " of Maryland, which antedates the ordi- 
nance of 1787 by ten years. However, nothing is said of 
new States in either the New York Facilitating Act or the 
New York Deed of Limitation; the only arguments upon 
which those documents rest are the desirability of closing the 
Confederation and the justice of distributing the lands among 
the States. 

' The New Princeton Review, September, 1887, 184. 



XIII. 
THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS.— (II.) 

On January 31, 1781, the resolution of October 10, 1780, 
together with the accumulated acts and resolutions of the 
States of Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, had been re- 
ferred to a committee consisting of Messrs. Witherspoon, 
Duane, Root, Adams, Sullivan, Burke, and Walton. The pe- 
titions of the Indiana and Vandalia Land Companies, as well 
as of two other companies that had memorialized Congress con- 
cerning their claims, were also referred to the same committee. 
Ultimately this commattee, and another one that came in its 
room, became a sort of clearing house to which all troublesome 
questions that in any way touched the land-issue were sent. 
One of the first questions that it had to deal with, as well as 
one of the most difificult, was the guarantee demanded by Vir- 
ginia as the condition of ceding the country beyond the Ohio. 
We must see what such a guarantee really involved. 

First, the lands claimed by the Indiana and Vandalia 
Companies lay on the southeastern side of the Ohio, Sec- 
ondly, the State of New York, before her deed of cession, 
claimed the whole country west of the Alleghanies, from the 
Lakes to the Cumberland Mountains. Thirdly, it was held 
by some, irrespective of the claims of the company and of 
New York, that the Crown had limited Virginia on the west 
by the Alleghanies, and that her claim to what is now West 
Virginia and Kentucky was spurious. Hence the committee 
was compelled to inquire into the merits of the case as be- 
tween the companies and New York on the one part and 
Virginia on the other, unless, indeed, Congress should either 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 219 

give or refuse the guarantee without any inquiry whatever. 
It will be remembered that .the question had been touched by 
the report of October 29, 1779, when it declared that, in the 
matter of the Indiana and Vandalia claims, it could " not find 
any such distinction between the question of the jurisdiction 
of Congress and the merits of the cause as to recommend any 
decision upon the first separately from the last." In the light 
of these facts, the motive of Virginia in asking a guarantee of 
her whole territorial claim east and south of the Ohio River is 
obvious. Evidently, Congress must waive the Virginia cession 
altogether, or it must inquire whether part of the territories 
to be guaranteed did not belong to the land-companies, as also 
whether a still larger part of them had not already been ceded 
to the United States by New York. 

Accordingly, the committee of seven called on the Con- 
necticut, New York, and Virginia delegates in Congress, as 
well as the agents of the four land-companies, to present their 
respective claims, with the proofs on which they rested them. 
On October 16, 1781, the Virginia delegates submitted to 
Congress a representation urging that such an inquiry as was 
contemplated into the claims of companies claiming lands with- 
in the limits of particular States was beyond its jurisdiction, 
and asking whether Congress had intended that the committee 
should hear evidence, in behalf of the companies, that was ad- 
verse to the claims or cessions of Virginia, New York, or 
Connecticut. The paper declared it derogatory to the sover- 
eignty of a State, thus to be drawn into contest with a land- 
company.' On the 26th of the same month the Virginia 
delegates brought up the question again, this time seeking 
to carry a motion denying to the committee the right "to ad- 
mit counsel, or to hear documents, proofs, or evidence not 
among the records, nor on the files of Congress, which have 
not been specially referred to them." This was all in har- 



' The citations to proceedings in Congress are now found in the Journals of 
Congress, under the respective dales, unless otherwise indicated. 



220 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

mony with the Virginia remonstrance of two years before. 
But Congress persisted, voting down the motion of Octo- 
ber 26th, five votes to three; and on November 3, 1781, the 
committee submitted an elaborate report covering the whole 
ground. In the first paragraph of this very important docu- 
ment, the committee state that the New York and Connecti- 
cut delegates had submitted the claims of their States, with 
vouchers to support the same, but that the Virginia delegates, 
" declining any elucidation of their claim, either to the lands 
ceded in the act referred to your [the] committee, or the lands 
requested to be guaranteed to the said State by Congress, 
delivered to your [the] committee the written paper hereto 
annexed and numbered 20." ' This paper is not printed in 
the " Journals," but the original is found among the unpub- 
lished papers of Congress. It is signed by the Virginia dele- 
gates, including Mr. Madison, and is a statement of the reasons 
why they refused to present the grounds of the Virginia claim 
to the committee. This is the most important : 

" The acts of Congress in compliance with which the above 
mentioned cessions [viz., those of New York, Connecticut, and 
Virginia] were made, are founded on the supposed inexpedi- 
ency of discussing the question of right, and recommended to 
the several states having territorial claims in the western coun- 
try, a liberal surrender of a portion of these claims for the ben- 
efit of the United States, as the most advisable means of remov- 
ing the embarrassments which such questions created. To make 
these acts of surrender, then, the basis of a discussion of terri- 
torial rights, is a direct contravention of the acts of Congress, 
and tends to diminish the weight and efficacy of future rec- 
ommendations from them to their constituents."' 



' This report is found in the Journals under the date of May i, 1782. Messrs. 
Boudinot, Varnum, Jenifer, Smith, and Livermore are here given as constituting 
the committee. I have not found any mention, in the Journals, of a second com- 
mittee being appointed. 

2 See argument of Samuel F. Vinton in case of Virginia vs. Garner and others 
Publications O. Arch, and Hist. So., Vol. IV. 67, et seq. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 221 

It cannot be denied, that for Congress to conduct an in- 
quirj'- into the grounds of title by which any State held, or 
claimed to hold, her territories was a departure from the 
policy hitherto pursued ; nor that Virginia, in asking for the 
guarantee, had presented suf^cient occasion for the departure 
to be made. In view of the outcome, it is plain that Virginia 
made a false step when she asked for the guarantee. But the 
conclusions reached by the committee were still more distaste- 
ful to Virginia than the inquiry itself, as we shall now see. 

The report made, November 3, 1781, came up for action. 
May I, 1782. First, it recommended the acceptance of the 
New York cession as contained in the deed executed by 
Messrs. Duane, Floyd, and McDougal, March i, 1781, The 
reasons that induced the committee to recommend the ac- 
ceptance of this cession are an important part of the literature 
relating to the ownership of the Western lands. These were 
fully presented, with remarks, in the statement of the North- 
western claims made in the last chapter. The additional 
observation is called for that, at this distance, the New York 
claim appears the most flimsy of all the Western claims ; and 
it is hard to resist the conclusion that it was preferred by the 
committee from a desire to get a leverage on the other States, 
and particularly on Virginia. This view is supported by the 
general history of the subject, by the composition of the com- 
mittee, and by the testimony of Mr. Madison, soon to be ad- 
duced. The five men who composed the committee were 
Boudinot of New Jersey, Varnum of Rhode Island, Jenifer 
of Maryland, Smith of Pennsylvania, and Livermore of New 
Hampshire. 

The report strongly urged Massachusetts and Connecticut 
to make an immediate release of all their claims and preten- 
sions to the Western territories, without condition or reserva- 
tion. Not a word was said about the conditional cession that 
Connecticut had already made. 

Coming to the cession proffered by Virginia, the com- 
mittee reported that it was not consistent with the interest of 



222 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the United States, the duty that Congress owed to their con- 
stituents, or the rights necessarily vested in Congress as the 
sovereign power of the United States, to accept the said ces- 
sion, or to guarantee the tract of country claimed by Virginia 
southeast of the Ohio ; assigning the following reasons for 
this conclusion : 

*' I. It appeared to your committee from the vouchers laid 
before them, that all the lands ceded, or pretended to be ceded, 
to the United States by the state of Virginia, are within the 
claims of the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New 
York, being part of the lands belonging to the said Six Nations 
of Indians and their tributaries. 

" 2. It appeared that great part of the lands claimed by the 
state of Virginia, and requested to be guaranteed to them by 
Congress, is also within the claim of the state of New York, 
being also a part of the country of the said Six Nations and 
their tributaries. 

" 3. It also appeared that a large part of the lands last afore- 
said are to the westward of the west boundary line of the late 
colony of Virginia, as established by the King of Great Britain, 
in Council, previous to the present revolution. 

"4. It appeared that a large tract of said lands hath been 
legally and equitably sold and conveyed away under the gov- 
ernment of Great Britain before the declaration of indepen- 
dence by persons claiming the absolute property thereof. 

"5. It appeared that in the year 1763, a very large part 
thereof was separated and appointed for a distinct government 
and colony by the King of Great Britain, with the knowledge 
and approbation of the government of Virginia. 

"6. The conditions annexed to the said cession are incom- 
patible with the honor, interests, and peace of the United States, 
and therefore, in the opinion of your committee, altogether in- 
admissible." 

These reasons, together with those given for adopting the 
resolution accepting the New York cession, totally deny the 
validity of Virginia's claim to territory west of the mountains, 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 223 

and fully affirm the sufficiency of New York's title. Still, to 
put an end to all questions, the committee recommended the 
following resolution : 

" That it be earnestly recommended to the state of Virginia, 
as they value the peace, welfare and increase of the United 
States, that they re-consider their said act of cession, and by a 
proper act for that purpose, cede to the United States all 
claims and pretensions of claim to the lands and country be- 
yond a reasonable western boundary, consistent with tlieir 
former acts while a colony under the power of Great Britain, 
and agreeable to their just rights of soil and jurisdiction at 
the commencement of the present war, and that free from any 
conditions and restrictions whatever." 

The committee further reported that the Indiana claim 
was a bona fide claim, made in the usual way ; and it therefore 
recommended that, in case the said lands were finally ceded 
to the United States by Great Britain, Congress should con- 
firm to such of the purchasers as were citizens of the United 
States their respective shares and proportions of such lands. 

After reciting the facts relating to the Vandalia grant, 
the committee declared it wholly incompatible with the in- 
terests of the United States to permit such inordinate grants 
of lands to be vested in individual citizens of the States ; 
nevertheless, in order to do strictest justice to such of the said 
company as should remain citizens of the United States, it 
recommended that, in case the tract should finally be ad- 
judged to the United States, Congress should make reason- 
able provision for them out of the lands. 

The committee recommended, further, that the claims of 
the Illinois and Wabash Companies be dismissed, on the 
ground that they were originally illegal. 

Finally, the committee declared that many inconveniences 
would arise unless the jurisdiction of Congress in regard to 
Indian affairs was more clearly defined, and so submitted a 
number of resolutions intended to accomplish that end. 



224 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

This report was never acted upon as a whole; and to fol- 
low it through the Journals is a wearisome undertaking, espe- 
cially as the land-issue soon becomes complicated with 
other subjects, as the national finances. 

As early as 1776, attention was drawn to the Northwest- 
ern lands " as a resource amply adequate, under proper regu- 
lations, for defraying the whole expense of the war." ' Now 
that the Confederation had been completed, and the financial 
embarrassments of the country were becoming greater and 
greater, the eyes of the people and of Congress were more and 
more turning to the Northwest to find the means of relief. 
On July 31, 1782, a grand committee of one from each State, 
appointed to consider and report the most effective means of 
supporting the credit of the United States, recommended 
Congress to decide upon the cessions made by Connecticut, 
New York, and Virginia. " It is their opinion," say the com- 
mittee, " that the Western lands, if ceded to the United States, 
might contribute toward a fund for paying the debt of these 
States." As a substitute for this part of the report, Mr. 
Witherspoon offered a series of resolutions asserting that such 
cessions, if made agreeably to the resolutions of 1780, " would 
be an important fund for the discharge of the national debt," 
and strongly urging them upon the claimant States. For 
some reason these resolutions, as well as the foregoing item 
of the report, were lost ; but the phrase " national debt " " 
shows that the national idea was growing. 

Replying, January 30, 1783, to the complaints of Pennsyl- 
vania that she could not procure payments of money due her 
from the Federal Government, Congress called attention to 
the steps taken to secure the Western cessions, begging Penn- 
sylvania to consider the subject " as of importance, not only 
as may affect the public credit, but as it will contribute to 



Silas Deane : See Adams's Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to 
the United Stales, 22. 

^ Journals of Congress, IV. , 68, 69 ; 82, 83. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 22$ 

give general satisfaction to the members of the Union." On 
April 1 8th the subject came up again as a part of the well- 
known financial scheme of that year, as will soon be pointed 
out more at length. 

Next to the " Journals of Congress," the " Madison 
Papers " and Mr. Madison's reports of the debates in Con- 
gress, found in " Elliot's Debates," are the principal sources of 
information concerning the land-cessions. Mr. Madison was 
in Congress in 1780, 1781, 1782; and his letters to his Vir- 
ginia correspondents in those years throw a flood of light on 
the whole subject, making clear the motives that governed 
the Virginia delegates, revealing hidden springs of action, and 
showing conclusively that politics played a large part in those 
transactions. 

Writing to Edmund Pendleton, September 12, 1780, of the 
resolution of Congress adopted six days before, he expresses 
the sanguine belief that the States to which that appeal is 
made " will see the necessity of closing the union in too 
strong a light to oppose the only expedient that can ac- 
complish it.'" To Joseph Jones, September 19th, October 
19th, and November 21st of the same year, he suggests that 
the States making cessions can shut off the land-companies, 
called by him " land-mongers," by expressly excluding them 
from all participation in the lands ceded ; he does not believe 
there is any design in Congress to gratify the avidity of land- 
mongers, but the best security for their virtue in this respect 
will be to keep it out of their power ; and declares a prop- 
osition to arbitrate the issue between the Indiana Company 
and Virginia, submitted by Morgan, irreconcilable with the 
honor and sovereignty of the State. Writing to Jones, Novem- 
ber 28th, he thus touches the Connecticut cession: "They 
reserve the jurisdiction to themselves, and clog the cession 
with some other conditions which greatly depreciate it, and 



' Unless otherwise designated, the citations from Madison are from the Mad- 
ison Papers. See the respective dates. 

'5 



226 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

are the more extraordinary as their title to the land is so con- 
trovertible a one." December 19th, he expresses to Jones 
regret that the Virginia Assembly has not acted on the Con- 
gressional recommendation, because the delay will tend to 
postpone Maryland's ratification of the Confederation. To 
Edmund Randolph he writes, May i, 1781, that the attempt 
to secure the acceptance of the Virginia cession " has pro- 
duced all the perplexing and dilatory objections which its 
adversaries could devise." He declares to Randolph, October 
30th of the same year, that "an agrarian law is as much 
coveted by the little members of the Union as ever it was by 
the indigent citizens of Rome;" he cherishes "little hope of 
arresting any aggression upon Virginia which depends solely 
on the inclination of Congress ;" he thinks the rule requiring 
seven States to carry a vote will be a check on the " agrarians," 
but in another letter he speaks of the same rule as retarding 
business. November 13th, he tells Pendleton that the Vir- 
ginia cession will not " be adopted with the conditions an- 
nexed to it ; " and then states the programme of the opposi- 
tion as follows : 

"The opinion seems to be, that an acceptance of the ces- 
sion of New York will give Congress a title which will be 
maintainable against all the other claimants. In this, however, 
they will certainly be deceived ; and even if it were otherwise, 
it would be their true interest, as well as conformable to the 
plan on which the cessions were recommended, to bury all 
further contentions by covering the territory with the titles of 
as many of the claimants as possible." 

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 18, 1781, Mad- 
ison writes of the " hostile machinations of some of the States 
against our territorial claims ; " says the report of the com- 
mittee, made November 3, 1781, " is not founded on the ob- 
noxious doctrine of an inherent right in the United States to 
the territory in question, but on the expediency of clothing 
them with the title of New York, which is supposed to be 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 227" 

maintainable against all others; " utters the opinion that the 
principles of the report will not be ratified by Congress ; and 
adds that the committee was composed of a member each 
from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, 
and New Hampshire, " all of which States, except the last, 
are systematically and notoriously adverse to the claims of 
Western territory, and particularly those of Virginia." In 
this, as in others of his letters, Mr. Madison expresses the 
fear that the Virginia Assembly will become offended at the 
unreasonable course pursued by Congress, and so refuse fur- 
ther help to end the controversy. He says, also, that the in- 
vestigation made by the committee of the rights of States 
and companies was vindicated on the ground that the condi- 
tions annexed by Virginia to the cession made it necessary. 
In a second letter to Jefferson, bearing date, January 15, 1782, 
he reviews the history of the cessions to date. He speaks 
again of the " machinations " against Virginia, and of the per- 
severance with which her territorial rights are " persecuted ; " 
he says an accurate and full collection of the documents bear- 
ing on Virginia's title would be of great service to the Vir- 
ginia delegation, and calls upon Mr. Jefferson to investigate 
the whole subject from the original charter down. Writing to 
Mr. Jefferson again, April i6th, he describes the line of at- 
tack on the Virginia title. The adversaries of the State will 
be either the United States or New York, or both. " The 
former will either claim on the principle that the vacant coun- 
try is not included in any particular State, and consequently 
falls to the whole, or will clothe themselves with the title of 
the latter by accepting its cession." He again calls on his 
distinguished correspondent to trace the title of Virginia to 
the disputed lands. 

In a letter to Randolph, of August 13, 1782, he says 
" several of the Middle States seem to be facing about." 
Maryland, however, " preserves its wonted jealousy and ob- 
stinacy." In another letter to Randolph he discusses the 
financial bearings of the land-question in reference to a recent 



228 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

debate in Congress, and states the circumstances leading to 
the Witherspoon resolutions already cited. 

" After the usual discussion of the question of right, and a 
proposal of opposite amendments to make the report favor the 
opposite sides, a turn was given to the debate to the question 
of expediency, in which it became pretty evident to all parties, 
that unless a compromise took place no advantage would ever 
be derived to the United States, even if their right were ever 
so valid. The number of States interested in the opposite doc- 
trines rendered it impossible for the title of the United States 
ever to obtain a vote of Congress in its favor, much less any coer- 
cive measure to render the title of any fiscal importance ; whilst 
the individual States, having botli the will and the means to 
avail themselves of their pretensions, miglit open their land 
offices, issue their patents, and, if necessary, protect the execu- 
tion of their grants, witliout any other molestation than the 
clamors of individuals within and without the doors of Con- 
gress. This view of the case had a manifest effect on the tem- 
perate advocates of the Federal title. . . . 

" Every review I take of the western territory produces 
fresh conviction that it is the true policy of Virginia, as well 
as of the United States, to bring the dispute to a friendly com- 
promise. A separate government cannot be distant, and will 
be an insuperable barrier to subsequent profits. If, therefore, 
the decision of the state on the claims of companies can be 
saved, I hope her other conditions will be relaxed." 

He means, no doubt, that Virginia shall drop her demand 
for a guarantee. 

Replying, March 24, 1782, to Madison's loud calls for help, 
Mr. Jefferson expresses surprise at the plan to set up New 
York's claim against Virginia's. Previous to the receipt of 
Madison's letter, he had never been able to comprehend a 
ground on which Virginia's right could be denied that " would 
not at the same time subvert the right of all the States to 
the whole of their territory." He confesses his inability to 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 229 

add anything to the argument on the Virginia side, and 
ventures the opinion that, if the decision of Congress is un- 
favorable to Virginia, it will not close the question ; and 
supposes that men on the Western waters who are ambitious 
of office will urge a separation of the West by authority of 
Congress. Neither Mr. Madison's correspondents nor Mr. 
Madison himself ever suggested any standing ground for Vir- 
ginia other than the charter of the colony. 

We are indebted to Mr. Madison's correspondence for 
the information that the Western issue hinged on another 
famous question of those days. This is the question of the 
admission of Vermont to the Union, that has already been 
treated in another place. This issue became involved with 
the land-question as early as 1781. On August 14th of that 
year, Mr. Madison predicted the speedy triumph of Vermont, 
assigning this as one of his reasons : " The jealous policy of 
some of the little States which hope that such a precedent 
may engender a division of some of the large ones." Under 
date of May i, 1782 — the very day that the report of 1781 
was taken up — Mr. Madison committed to writing some 
noteworthy " observations relating to the influence of Ver- 
mont and the Territorial Claims on the politics of Congress." 

The New England States, with the exception of New 
Hampshire, patronize the independence of Vermont from an- 
cient hostility to New York, from the interest of their citi- 
zens in Vermont lands, but principally from the accession of 
weight this will give that section in Congress. Pennsylvania 
and Maryland also patronize the pretensions of Vermont, as 
do New Jersey and Delaware ; the first two, " with the sole 
view of reinforcing the opposition to claims of Western terri- 
tory, particularly those of Virginia ;" the other two, "with the 
additional view of strengthening the interests of the little 
States." Rhode Island is also influenced by these considera- 
tions, as well as by those that influence the other New Eng- 
land States. New York opposes Vermont for obvious rea- 
sons. Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia oppose Vermont 



230 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

on four grounds : A habitual jealousy of Eastern predomi- 
nance; the opposition that it is expected Vermont, if admitted, 
will oppose to Western claims ; the inexpediency of admitting 
so small a State on an equal footing with the first members 
of the Union ; the tendency of the example to bring about a 
premature dismemberment of the other States. 

It is plain that the admission of Vermont under the cir- 
cumstances would be a sort of premium on rebellion, and 
might encourage the Virginians west of the mountains to 
revolution. Mr. Madison then defines the motives from 
which the States act on the other question. Of those that 
oppose the Western claims, Rhode Island is influenced by a 
desire to share the lands as a revenue-fund, and by the envy 
excited by superior resources and importance ; New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland are influenced by these 
considerations, but more by the intrigues of their citizens who 
are interested in the land-companies. The peculiar hostility 
of these States to Virginia is due to the fact that the claims 
of the companies lie within the limits of Virginia. Pennsyl- 
vania and Maryland would oppose Vermont, only their allies 
in the Western combination require them to favor her ; Mas- 
sachusetts and Connecticut thwart the settlement of the 
Western question until the admission of Vermont is made 
sure. With these States, Vermont is first and the lands sec- 
ond; with Pennsylvania and Maryland, the lands are first and 
Vermont second. No direct interest in the lands is accorded 
to Massachusetts, and but a slight one to Connecticut. New 
York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia all have Western 
claims in which they take an interest ; South Carolina least 
of all. New York's claim is very extensive, but her title 
is very flimsy. She urges it, expecting to obtain some ad- 
vantage or credit by its cession rather than hoping to main- 
tain it. 

It should be observed that the cession-policy was actually 
attended by some dangers that do not appear oh the surface 
of the subject. On the one hand, the cessions tended to 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 23 1 

Strengthen the Union by conciliating the non-claimant States ; 
on the other, they tended, or at least might tend, to engender 
dangerous divisive tendencies. Discussing the admission of 
Vermont, in a letter dated September 19, 1780, Mr. Madison 
says : " For my own part, if a final decision must take place, 
I am clearly of opinion that it ought to be made on prin- 
ciples that will effectually discountenance the erection of 
new governments without the sanction of proper authority, 
and in a style marking a due firmness and decision in Con- 
gress." 

Again, November 19, 1782, he writes that he has seen a 
letter from General Irvine, then at Fort Pitt, " which displays 
in full colors the avidity of the Western people for the vacant 
lands and for separate governments." Mr. Jefferson's corre- 
spondence bears a similar testimony. The over-mountain peo- 
ple of North Carolina, in defiance both of the parent State 
and of Congress, actually sought to set up the State of Frank- 
lin. And this divisive tendency was no doubt a fact to be 
considered by cautious statesmen. 

Having let in this side-light on the stage, we are ready to 
follow the movement of the scenes. 

On motion of the Maryland delegation, October 29, 1782, 
Congress accepted the New York cession as defined in the 
deed executed, March i, 1781, Virginia alone voting in the 
negative. November 5th, Mr. Madison explained to Mr. 
Randolph the reasons that led to this negative vote : " In the 
first place, such a measure, instead of terminating all contro- 
versy — -the object proposed by the original plan — introduces 
new perplexities ; and, in the second place, an assent from us 
might be hereafter pleaded as a voluntary acceptance of the 
United States in the room of New York as a litigant against 
Virginia." The acceptance of the New York cession, how- 
ever, did not include the approval of the reasons given by the 
committee of 1781 for its recommendations. This was a fort- 
unate circumstance, as it proved, for the way was thus left 
open for the compromise finally made. At the same time, 



232 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the acceptance of the New York cession was understood to 
be a decisive defeat of Virginia. Some members of Congress 
expected never again to hear of Virginia's land-claims. Such 
was the consummation of the long and determined effort 
made by Virginia to secure the acceptance by Congress of her 
cession with the guarantee. After this, the final success of 
the cession-policy was only a question of time. 

In the letter to Randolph last cited, Mr. Madison recounts 
the action of October 29th, and points out its bearings. 
" The success of the Middle States in obtaining the cession 
of New York has given great encouragement, and they are 
pursuing steadily the means of availing themselves of the 
other titles. That of Connecticut is proposed for the next 
object. Virginia will be postponed for the last. By enlisting 
the two preceding into their party, they hope to render their 
measures more effectual with respect to the last." He says 
the " coalition " of the Middle States with New York will hurt 
the pretensions of Vermont. New York, " by ceding a claim 
which was tenable neither by force nor by right," " has ac- 
quired with Congress the merit of liberality, rendered the 
title to her reservation more respectable, and at least damped 
the ardor with which Vermont has been abetted." 

The lands again came to the front in connection with the 
national finances. 

In a note to his report of the debate of February 26, 1783, 
on the famous revenue-plan of that year, Mr. Madison defines 
the position of the States with reference thereto. New 
Hampshire would approve of a share in the vacant territory. 
Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and 
Maryland are deeply interested in the lands. New York, 
since the acceptance of her cession, is interested in those of 
other States. Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia must make 
larger or smaller sacrifices of territory, Massachusetts, so 
far as appears, has no interest in the question. Connecticut 
may, perhaps, consider herself interested in the acquisition of 
the vacant lands " since the condemnation of her title to her 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 233 

Western claims," ' the reference being, of course, to the refusal 
to accept her cession. 

On April 9, 1783, a memorial praying Congress to grant a 
tract of land on Lake Erie to the Canadian refugees who had 
engaged in the cause of the United States led to a protracted 
discussion of the land-question. On the 1 8th of the same 
month the revenue-plan was adopted, containing the follow- 
ing recommendation : 

"That as a further means, as well of hastening the ex- 
tinguishment of the debts as of establishing the harmony of 
the United States, it be recommended to the states which have 
passed no acts towards complying with the resolutions of Con- 
gress of the 6th of September and loth of October, 1780, rela- 
tive to the cession of territorial claims, to make the liberal ces- 
sions therein recommended, and to the states which may have 
passed acts complying with the said resolutions in part only, to 
revise and complete such compliance." 

Mr. Madison's reports of these discussions contain no argu- 
ments with which we are not already familiar. 

Many members of Congress supposed that this recom- 
mendation was a finality ; they thought that, with the accept- 
ance of the New York cession, it sealed the fate of Virginia's 
Western claims. But the delegates from that State appar- 
ently had not given up the hope of obtaining the acceptance of 
the Virginia cession. At least, Mr. Bland made a motion to 
accept it, and the motion was referred to a committee. This 
committee reported, June 9, 1783, that action should be post- 
poned until Congress had proceeded to a determination on 
the report of November 3, 1781. Accordingly, Congress re- 
sumed the consideration of that report, and so much of it as 
related to the Virginia cession was referred to a committee 
consisting of Messrs. Rutledge, Ellsworth, Bedford, Gorham, 
and Madison. This reference alarmed the States that had so 

' Elliot's Debates, V., 59, 60. 



234 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

unflaggingly opposed the pretensions of Virginia, and that 
supposed the acceptance of the New York cession and the 
finance scheme meant the limitation of Virginia's claim on 
the west by the Alleghany Mountains, They feared that the 
reference meant a reopening of the whole question, and pos- 
sibly a backing down from the position taken, April i8th. 
This view of the case is well put in a vigorous remonstrance 
that New Jersey sent to Congress, June 20th, expressing sur- 
prise at the reopening of the question ; applying the recom- 
mendation of April 1 8th expressly to Virginia, whose cessior 
is declared " j^artial, unjust, and illiberal." and requesting 
Congress not to accept that cession but to press Virginia " to 
make a more liberal surrender of that territory of which they 
claim so boundless a proportion." The same day the report 
of the Rutledge Committee was considered. This report, 
after being under discussion for three months, was finally 
adopted, September 13, 1783. Mr. Madison thinks this report, 
when first offered, " a fit basis for a compromise," and ex- 
presses the hope, when it is finished, that it will meet the ul- 
timatum of Virginia.' How well grounded his view was, is 
shown by an examination of the report itself, and by the sub- 
sequent history. 

The report states the eight conditions that Virginia an- 
nexed to the cession of January 2, 1781, and disposes of them 
one by one ; pointing out that some of them have been met 
already, that others are reasonable and should be met, and 
that some are unnecessary because they are covered by others. 
The last condition, that requiring the guarantee, is thus dis- 
posed of : 

"As to the last condition, your committee are of opinion, 
that Congress cannot agree to guarantee to the commonwealth 
of Virginia, the land described in the said condition, witliout 
entering into a discussion of the right of the state of Virginia 



' Madison Papers, 543, 572. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 235 

to the said land ; and that by the acts of Congress it appears 
to have been their intention, which the committee cannot but 
approve, to avoid all discussion of the territorial rights of in- 
dividual states, and only to recommend and accept a cession 
of their claims whatsoever they might be, to vacant territory. 
Your committee conceive this condition of a guarantee, to be 
either unnecessary or unreasonable ; inasmuch as, if the land 
above mentioned is really the property of the State of Virginia, 
it is sufficiently secured by the Confederation, and if it is not 
the property of that state, there is no reason or consideration 
for such guarantee." 

The report closes with a recommendation that, if the 
legislature of Virginia make a cession conformable to these 
views, Congress shall accept such cession. Maryland and 
New Jersey alone voted in the negative. 

The report adopted September 18, 1783, is in marked 
contrast with the one offered November 3, I78i,and for which, 
in some sense, it was a substitute. Partictilarly is it impossi- 
ble to harmonize what is said of the guarantee in 1783 with 
the arguments adduced two years before to prove the validity 
of the New York claim and the invalidity of the Virginia 
claim. The one document gives the results of an inquiry 
into the question of right ; the other waives such inquiry al- 
together, on the ground that it is the settled policy of Con- 
gress to avoid all such inquiries and discussions, and only to 
recommend the cession of State claims, w^hatever they may 
be. Evidently a change has come over the temper of Con- 
gress. In 1 78 1 the policy was to put pressure on Virginia 
with a view of inducing her to cede the territory between the 
AUeghanies and the Ohio. Hence the affirmation of New 
York's claim. The Union was to be clothed with New 
York's title, as Mr. Madison states in his letters. Such was 
the plan of the non-claimant States in 1781. Time has told 
against that plan, and a new one has been agreed upon as a 
compromise. Nothing is said in the report of 1783 about the 
lands southeast of the Ohio ; the right to inquire into titles 



236 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

is denied ; Congress can only recommend cessions and accept 
them when made. This leaves the way open for Virginia to 
withdraw her demand for a guarantee, at the same time that 
she renews the cession of the Northwest. As the reasons of 
1 78 1 have never been adopted, Congress can tacitly assent to 
the southern limitation of the cessions by the Ohio River. 
This will leave the lands within the present States of \\ est 
Virginia and Kentucky in Virginia's possession, which is ex- 
actly what she has been contending for from the first. The 
details of this plan were evidently arranged by the Rutledge 
Committee. 

Virginia promptly performed the part assigned her. On 
October 20, 1783, her legislature passed an act authorizing a 
cession of the territory northwest of the Ohio. Before stating 
the terms of this cession, however, we must attend to an at- 
tempt that was made to break up the compromise, and to 
wrest the lands claimed by the Indiana Company from the 
grasp of Virginia. * 

Alarmed at the prospect of being abandoned by Congress, 
Colonel George Morgan, the petitioner of three years before, 
in behalf of himself and his fellow-proprietors, applied to New 
Jersey for protection, of which State some of them were citi- 
zens. He proposed, virtually, that the State should adopt 
the Indiana Company's claim as its own, at least to the ex- 
tent of suing for an investigation of the title by a Federal 
court. The legislature, probably in the hope of defeating the 
compromise, accepted the proposal, and appointed Morgan its 
agent for the purpose of bringing the claim before Congress. 

In his petition, dated February 24th, and presented in 
Congress, March i, 1784, Morgan recites the fact of his ap- 
pointment, quotes the finding of the committee of 1781 con- 
cerning the Indiana Company, says Virginia still claims the 
same lands, denies the validity of her claim, and prays for a 
hearing in the premises agreeably to the Ninth Article of the 
Confederation. A motion to commit was lost, as was a 
motion for a committee to prepare an answer to New Jersey. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 237 

We have no intimation why Congress refused this applica- 
tion — possibly because it did not consider Article IX. as cover- 
ing the case. Mr. Madison, in one of his letters, says he does 
not understand the policy of the land-companies in opposing 
the Virginia compromise. " They can never hope for specific 
restitution of their claims ; they can never even hope for a 
cession of the country between the Alleghany and the Ohio 
by Virginia ; as little can they hope for an extension of a 
jurisdiction of Congress over it by force. I should suppose, 
therefore, that it would be their truest interest to promote a 
general cession of the vacant country to Congress ; and in 
case the titles of which they have been stripped should be 
deemed reasonable, and Congress should be disposed to make 
any equitable compensation, Virginia would be no more in- 
terested in opposing it than the other States." ' The petition 
of March i, 1784, is the last that we hear of the Indiana 
Company in the Old Congress. 

Having thus refused to do anything with Morgan's peti- 
tion. Congress the same day took up and accepted the deed of 
cession that Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues had already pre- 
sented in behalf of Virginia. After reciting the resolutions 
of Congress of 1780, the Virginia cession of 1781, and the re- 
port adopted by Congress, September 13, 1783, the act on 
which the deed is based stipulates that "the territory so ceded 
shall be laid out and formed into states, containing a suitable 
extent of territory, not less than one hundred nor more than 
one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as cir- 
cumstances will admit, and that the states so formed shall 
be distinct republican states, and admitted members of the 
Federal Union, having the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, 
and independence as the other states ; " that the reasonable ex- 
penses incurred by Virginia in subduing and garrisoning any 
part of this territory shall be paid ; that the inhabitants of 
the Kaskaskia, Vincennes, and the neighboring French vil- 

' Madison Papers, 543, 544. 



238 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

lages who have become citizens of Virginia shall have their 
titles confirmed to them ; that one hundred and fifty thousand 
acres of land promised by Virginia to Clark and the officers 
and men who served under him in the Northwest shall be 
granted to them ; that in case certain lands reserved for the 
Virginia troops on the Continental establishment, south of the 
Ohio River between the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, 
should " prove insufficient for their legal bounties, the defi- 
ciency shall be made up to the said troops, in good lands, to 
be laid off between the Rivers Scioto and Little Miami, on 
the northwest side of the River Ohio ; " and that all the 
lands so ceded, not reserved for any of the enumerated pur- 
poses, and not disposed of in bounties to the officers and sol- 
diers of the American army, shall be a common fund for the 
use, aid, and benefit of the members of the Union, present or 
future, Virginia included, "according to their usual respective 
proportions in the general charge and expenditure, and shall 
be faithfully and boiia fide disposed of for that purpose, and 
for no other use or purpose whatsoever." The cession is of 
" all right, title, and claim, as well of soil as of jurisdiction, 
which the said commonwealth hath to the territory or tract of 
country within the limits of the Virginia charter, situate, lying, 
and being to the northwest of the River Ohio." The act also 
expresses the hope that Congress, in justice to Virginia for 
her liberal cession, will earnestly press upon the other States 
claiming large bodies of waste lands to make cessions equally 
liberal for the common benefit and support of the Union. 

A motion to add to the resolution accepting the deed 
the proviso that its acceptance should not be considered as 
implying any opinion or decision of Congress respecting the 
extent or validity of the claim of Virginia to Western terri- 
tory, by charter or otherwise, received the votes of only New 
Jersey and Pennsylvania. New Jersey alone voted against 
accepting the deed. South Carolina was divided, Maryland 
was not present. 

Such was the end of the long struggle between Congress 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 239 

and Virginia, The sole question at issue had long been the 
territory southeast of the Ohio. Virginia demanded a guar- 
antee in 1 78 1 as a reply to the demand that she should be 
bounded on the west by the mountains. That guarantee was 
not given, and yet Virginia won a substantial victory. Now 
that the demand to shut her up between the sea and the moun- 
tains was pressed with less vigor, and there was a disposition 
to recede from the reasons of the report of 1781, she was quite 
willing to let the guarantee go, and accept in its stead a tacit 
understanding that she should not be molested in the posses- 
sion of the back lands. By this time the dispute had become 
wearisome; the compromise suggested by the report of 1783 
offered a practicable settlement, and a large majority of Con- 
gress, as the votes show% were very glad to accept that compro- 
mise and let the matter drop. The controversy with Virginia 
was considerably affected by the events of the war. Hildreth 
says the terror inspired by Arnold's approach to Richmond was 
a main motive with Virginia in making the cession of 1781.' 
After the peace of 1783 Congress was less disposed to press 
Virginia to make a more liberal cession, and Virginia was less 
disposed to yield. Had the war gone on a year or two longer 
— at least, had Maryland's ratification of the Articles been 
postponed so long — it is not impossible that Virginia's west- 
ern boundary would have been drawn where it now is, at the 
close of the Revolution rather than at the beginning of the 
Civil War. 

In the course of the long discussion about the West, there 
was a considerable fluctuation of opinion as to the proper 
number and size of the new States, Virginia was the only 
State making a cession which stipulated that the territory 
ceded should be formed into States ; and she imposed a rule 
of division that would have given anywhere from ten to 
twenty States in the Northwest, But in 1788, in response to 
a representation made by Congress two years before, that such 

' History, III., 399. 



240 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

division would "be productive of many and great inconveni- 
ences," growing out of geographical conditions, Virginia con- 
sented to such a modification of her deed and cession as 
would admit of "not more than five States nor less than three, 
as the situation of that country and future circumstances may 
require." This was simply ratifying Article V. of the com- 
pacts of 1787. 

The two States making largest land-pretensions had now 
ceded as much of their lands as they proposed to cede. Con- 
necticut and Massachusetts still retained their claims in the 
Northwest, and the Carolinas and Georgia theirs in the South- 
west. It was confidently expected, however, that the two ces- 
sions would bring about the others in time. From this point 
the subject is less prominent in the national councils, is less 
interesting, and can be more rapidly despatched. 

In April, 1784, Congress again called attention to the 
Western territory as an important financial resource, and urged 
those States that had not complied with the recommendation 
of September 6, 1780, to make immediate and liberal cessions. 
On November 13, 1784, the General Court of Massachusetts 
passed an act authorizing her delegates in Congress to exe- 
cute a deed of cession of such part of the tract of land lying 
between the Hudson River and the Mississippi, belonging to 
the State, as they might think proper, in such manner and 
on such conditions as should appear to them most suitable. 
On April 19, 1785, Samuel Holton and Rufus King, delegates, 
executed and Congress accepted such deed, conveying and 
releasing to the United States all of Massachusetts's right 
and title to lands, both soil and jurisdiction, lying within the 
charter-limits of the State, west of a meridian line drawn 
through the western bent or inclination of Lake Ontario, pro- 
vided such line should fall twenty miles or more west of the 
western limit of the Niagara River; and if not, then west of 
the meridian falling that distance west of said river. This was 
adopting the New York line of four years before. It will be 
remembered that Massachusetts then claimed nearly all West- 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 24I 

ern New York. The New York and Massachusetts cessions 
did not in any way touch that controversy. It was finally 
settled by a joint commission of the two States in 1786. The 
meridian marking the eastern limit of the New York and 
Massachusetts cession, which is also the western boundary of 
the former State from latitude 42° to Lake Erie, was surveyed 
and marked in 1790. 

The State of Connecticut, by an act of May 11, 1786, au- 
thorized "an ample deed of release and cession of all the right, 
title, interest, jurisdiction, and claim of Connecticut to certain 
western lands, beginning at the completion of the 41° of north 
latitude, 120 miles west of the western boundary line of the 
commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as now claimed by said com- 
monwealth, and from thence by a line drawn north, parallel to 
and 120 miles west of the said west line of Pennsylvania, and 
to continue north until it come to 42° 2' north latitude." The 
effect of this cession, if adopted, would be to leave in the 
hands of Connecticut that part of her original claim which is 
bounded north by the international boundary-line, east by 
Pennsylvania, south by parallel 41°, and west by a meridian 
line one hundred and twenty miles west of the western bound- 
ary of Pennsylvania — the Western Reserve. It also left the 
controversy between New York and Connecticut as to the 
" Gore " unsettled. The extent of one hundred and twenty 
miles east and west was given to the reservation because 
that was the extent of the Susquehanna purchase of 1754. 
The acceptance of this cession was strongly opposed in Con- 
gress because it was partial, and because to accept it would be 
indorsing the charter of 1662. After a severe struggle it was 
accepted. May 26, 1786, Maryland alone voting in the nega- 
tive. Messrs. Johnson and Sturgess executed the deed Sep- 
tember 14th, following. 

Mr. Grayson, of Virginia, writing to Washington, said the 
result of the Connecticut reservation was a clear loss of about 
six million acres of land to the United States, which had al- 
ready been ceded by Virginia and New York, Connecticut, 
16 



242 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

he said, would at once open a land-office and sell the lands. 
Grayson then states the reasons urged in Congress for accept- 
ing the cession : 

" That the claim of a powerful State, although unsupported 
by right, was, under present circumstances, a disagreeable 
thing ; that sacrifices must be made for the public tranquillity, 
as well as to acquire an indisputable title to the residue ; that 
Connecticut would settle it immediately with emigrants well 
disposed to the Union, who would form a barrier, not only 
against the British but the Indian tribes ; and that the thick 
settlement they would immediately form would enhance the 
value of the adjacent country and facilitate emigration thereto." 

Washington ascribed the acceptance of the cession, with 
the reservation, to " a want of competent knowledge of the 
Connecticut claim to Western lands.'" Grayson can be ex- 
cused for magnifying three million two hundred and fifty 
thousand acres of land into six million, as the geography of 
the Lake Erie region was not then carefully known ; but it 
seems strange to find Mr. Bancroft repeating the blunder in 
the last edition of his history.^ 

It has always been the fashion to berate Connecticut for 
illiberality in making her cession. No State came through 
the cession controversy with less credit. This feeling is hard 
to explain. Connecticut was more tardy than New York, 
Virginia, and Massachusetts, but she was much more prompt 
than the Carolinas and Georgia. She reserved some lands, 
but so did all the other ceding States, and particularly Vir- 
ginia, whose course at the time provoked much more ill-feel- 
ing. Her charter had been jumped by later charters, but so 
had those of Virginia and Massachusetts. The lands that she 
retained were separated from her home territory ; but so 
were those that Massachusetts retained in Western New 
York. Of course she had not the reasonable excuse that 

''Sparks: Writings of Washington, IX., 177, 178. ^ VL, 279, 280. 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 243 

New York and Virginia had ; for the first of these States 
wished to have a Lake Erie front, and the second desired to 
be brought out to the Ohio River. 

The Connecticut cession completed the national title to 
the Northwest, except the Connecticut reservation. The 
next year Congress enacted the Ordinance of 1787, and the 
civil life of the Territory began in 1788. At that time the 
Southwest attracted less attention than the Northwest ; the 
framing of the Constitution and the organization of the gov- 
ernment under it, as well as the foreign embarrassments of 
the government coming soon after, drew more and more of 
the public attention ; and, very naturally, the subject of ces- 
sions fell somewhat into the background. Moreover, the 
Southwestern cessions Avere delayed and complicated by do- 
mestic disturbances and by foreign troubles. They do not 
come within the scope of this inquiry. 

This history shows that four different ideas as to the West- 
ern lands were first and last suggested. The original idea of 
the claimant States was to retain them for their own exclu- 
sive use ; and for a time the other States seemed to acquiesce 
in this policy. Secondly, it was proposed to distribute the 
lands or their proceeds, in whole or in part, among the States, 
leaving the jurisdiction in the hands of the claimant States. 
Connecticut acted on this idea in offering her first cession. 
The third proposition was the one for which Maryland con- 
tended so long and valiantly, viz. : That Congress should as- 
sert the sovereign power of the United States over the West- 
ern country without waiting for cessions. Lastly the plan of 
cession. This ultimately reached the same practical end that 
Maryland proposed, but by a different road. Manifestly, to 
persuade the claimant States to cede their lands to the Na- 
tion was not to assert a national title to them. 

But the lands were not, and could not be, fully national- 
ized as long as the Confederation lasted. The Articles gave 
Congress no resources except those that came from the 
States ; and although the Nation should ultimately receive 



244 'T^^ *^L^ NORTHWEST. 

the proceeds of the cessions, it could receive them only by- 
way of the States. Accordingly, the deeds made to the 
United States stipulated that the lands, or their proceeds, 
should be distributed among all the States in the Union, and 
this was the principle on which the Land Ordinance of 1785, 
that will form the subject of the next chapter, was con- 
structed. When the Constitution went into effect, in 1789, it 
fully nationalized the public domain. 

Unfortunately, the history of the cessions has not always 
been so presented as clearly to define the course that Con- 
gress pursued. For example, Chief Justice Chase speaks of 
the " claim " of the United States, which rested on the 
ground that the " Western lands had been the property of 
the Crown, and naturally fell, on the declaration of indepen- 
dence, to the opponent of the former sovereign." He thus 
balances this " claim " against the claims of the States : 

" Of these various claims, that of the United States seems 
to have been the most rational and just. The charter of Vir- 
ginia had been vacated by a judicial proceeding ; the company 
to which it was granted had been dissolved, the grant itself had 
been resumed by the Crown, and large tracts of the country 
included by its original limits had been patented to various in- 
dividuals and associations, without remonstrance on the part of 
the colony of Virginia. The expenses incurred, and the efforts 
made by Virginia, in the reduction of the British posts, and in 
the defence and protection of the frontier, created a just claim 
upon the treasury of the Union, but could not, of themselves, 
confer a valid title to tiie Western lands. The western boun- 
dary of Connecticut had been so clearly defined in her agree- 
ment with New York, that her claims to territory beyond that 
line could not be entitled to much consideration ; the preten- 
tions of New York were liable to easy refutation upon an ap- 
peal to western geography, and an investigation into the real 
extent of the territory of the Six Nations ; and the claim of 
Massachusetts rested upon a charter granted at a period when 
the territory now claime,d under it was actually possessed and 



THE NORTHWESTERN CESSIONS. 245 

occupied by France. In opposition to thiese various preten- 
tions, tfie Congress, as the common head of the United States, 
maintained its title to the Western lands upon the solid ground 
that a vacant territory wrested from the common enemy, by the 
united arms, and at the joint expense of all the States, ought of 
right to belong to Congress, in trust for the common use and 
benefit of the whole union." ' 

Congress never maintained a national "claim" on this 
" ground " or on any other ground. The argument here 
stated as a ground of title was often urged in discussion in 
and out of Congress, and is found in State resolutions. It no 
doubt had a material effect in forming the opinion of the 
time, but it cannot be found in a single act or resolution 
that ever passed the doors of Congress. The great argu- 
ments advanced by Congress in its appeals for cessions were 
the desirability of perfecting the Union, the need of harmony 
among the States, and the necessities of the treasury. Effec- 
tive as the national view was. Congress kept it sedulously in 
the background, and constantly acted on the federal theory 
of the national territory. The Western lands came to the 
Nation by a series of cessions that proceeded upon the as- 
sumption that the States making them ceded something, and 
that Congress received something in accepting them. 

The longer one studies the land-question of the Revolu- 
tion the more he is impressed by its difficulty, by its impor- 
tance, and by the wisdom and self-restraint that marked its 
settlement. No one can deny that the young republic had a 
happy escape from what might easily have been a great dis- 
aster. The cessions prevented a series of inevitable contro- 
versies growing out of conflicting claims ; and we may well 
question whether the machinery provided for settling such 
controversies by the Articles of Confederation was adequate 
to the task that their adjustment would have entailed. The 
cessions satisfied the non-claimant States, and so removed 

• Statutes of Ohio : Preliminary Sketcli of the History of Ohio, I., 12, 13. 



246 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

jealousy and heart-burning. They tended materially to na- 
tionalize the government, by creating the public domain for 
Congress to control and to prepare for future republics. 
They prepared the way for " the more perfect union " of the 
Constitution. Next to independence and union, the Western 
lands were the most important question that the Old Con- 
gress dealt with ; and no small part of their importance arose 
from their relation to independence and union. 

Note. — There lias been much discussion as to the value of 
the claims and titles now described, and therefore as to the value, 
in a legal point of view, of the cessions growing out of them. 
Sometimes the cessions are set wholly aside, and the North- 
western titles derived immediately from the treaty with Great 
Britain in 1783. An example of this procedure may be found 
in the Report of the Tenth Census, 1880. But such is not the 
procedure of the Supreme Court of the United States. The 
case of Handley's Lessee vs. Anthony ' involved the question 
whether a certain tract of land on the Indiana side of the Ohio 
River, that was an island at high water and a peninsula at low 
water, belonged to the jurisdiction of Indiana or of Kentucky, 
and so a construction of the language found in the Virginia deed 
of cession, " situate, lying, and being to the northwest of the 
River Ohio." Chief Justice Marshall, delivering the opinion of 
the Court, stated the question to be whether the river at low- 
water mark, or at its middle state, is the boundary between the 
States of Kentucky and Indiana, and held that low-water mark on 
the north side was such boundary. This he did on the ground that 
the question at issue depended, as he said, chiefly on Virginia's 
land-laws and her cession to the United States. This decision was 
at least an apparent recognition of Virginia's title to the country 
beyond the Ohio. In Garner's case, Mr. Vinton sought to break 
the force of this decision by alleging that the validity of the Vir- 
ginia claim was not in the record of the case actually before the 
Supreme Court, and so that the decision was not conclusive. 

1 Wheaton, V., 691. 



XIV. 
THE LAND ORDINANCE OF 178^. 

One of the great arguments used in urging the claimant 
States to surrender some portion of their Western lands was 
the needs of the State and Federal treasuries. In the resolu- 
tions of Congress asking for them, the cessions are considered 
as lands to be sold as well as territory to be made into new 
States. The idea of revenue is also prominent in the acts of 
cession. It was almost distinctively a new idea. In colonial 
days, waste lands had not proved a source of income to either 
the colonies or the Crown. The Crown had reserved a small 
quit-rent, but it was rarely paid. Virginia imposed an an- 
nual rental of two cents per acre upon her waste lands, and 
then threw them open to indiscriminate locations. Whole 
States, as West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, were dis- 
posed of w^ithout affording any public revenue whatever. It 
is, therefore, somewhat difficult to understand how the idea 
that the over-mountain lands would be a source of large 
income became current. But so it was. Whatever is the 
explanation, the new idea could not be realized without a 
system of surveys such as was unknown to any one of the 
colonies. This need was met by Congress in "An Ordi- 
nance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of lands in the 
Western territory," enacted May 20, 1785, but applying only 
to such lands as had already been ceded by individual States 
to the United States, and also been purchased by the United 
States of the Indians. Before presenting the salient features 
of this Ordinance, it is necessary to glance at two or three of 
these Indian treaties. 



248 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

By the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1 768, the Six Nations had 
sold all their right and title to lands lying south and south- 
east of the treaty-line running from the mouth of the Ten- 
nessee to Wood Creek, save those in the Province of Pennsyl- 
vania, the pre-emption of which belonged to the Penns, North 
and west of that line they continued in as full possession as 
ever. The protectorate of the Iroquois, recognized in 17 13 
and in 1726, in no way touched the fee of the Indian lands. 
Braddock marched toward the Forks of the Ohio to defend 
the allies of England, whose dominions were invaded, and he 
called upon the Indians to come to his help for that reason. 
But by a second Treaty of Fort Stanwix, negotiated in 1784 
by Oliver Wolcott, Richard Butler, and Arthur Lee, commis- 
sioners appointed by Congress, and the representatives of the 
Six Nations, they yielded to the United States all their, claims 
to the country west of a line drawn from Johnston's Landing 
Place on Lake Ontario southerly to the mouth of Buffalo 
Creek on Lake Erie, and always four miles south of the 
" carrying path " between the two lakes ; thence south to the 
north boundary of Pennsylvania; thence west to the end of 
the said north boundary ; and thence south to the Ohio 
River. The first practical effect of this line was the aliena- 
tion by the Iroquois of all their interest in the Northwest. 

The United States still had to deal with the Western Ind- 
ians—those on the soil — for these tribes did not acknowledge 
that the Six Nations could deed away their lands. A treaty 
concluded at Fort Mcintosh, January 21, 1785, between com- 
missioners of the United States and the sachems and war- 
riors of the Wyandot, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa na- 
tions, made the Cuyahoga River, the portage between that 
stream and the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum, and the 
Tuscarawas as far as the crossing place above Fort Laurens; 
a line drawn thence westerly to the portage of the Great 
Miami; the portage between the Miami and the Maumee, 
and the Maumee ; and Lake Erie to the north of the Cuya- 
hoga, the boundaries between the United States and the said 



THE LAND ORDINANCE OF 1785. 249 

tribes. Within these lines the Indians could still live and 
hunt ; but lands east, south, and west were declared to belong 
to the United States, " so far as the said Indians formerly 
claimed the same." This treaty, which was reaffirmed at 
Fort Harmar in 1789, was the first of a long series of treaties 
that finally put the United States in full possession of all the 
Northwestern lands. The two treaties now sketched show 
how matters stood when the old Congress enacted the Land 
Ordinance that we are now to examine. 

This Ordinance provided for a corps of surveyors, to be ap- 
pointed by Congress, or a committee of the States, one from 
each State, to survey the lands already ceded and purchased, 
under the directions of the Geographer of the United States. 
These paragraphs describe the main features of the plan of 
survey : 

" The surveyors . . . shall proceed to divide the said 
territory into townships of 6 miles square, by lines running due 
north and south, and others crossing these at right angles, as 
near as may be. 

"The first line, running north and south as aforesaid shall 
begin on the River Ohio, at a point that shall be found to be 
due north from the western termination of a line, which has 
been run as the southern boundary of the State of Pennsyl- 
vania ; and the first line running east and west shall begin 
at the same point and shall extend throughout the whole terri- 
tory ; provided that nothing herein shall be construed as fixing 
the western boundary of the State of Pennsylvania. The Ge- 
ographer shall designate the townships, or fractional parts of 
townships, by numbers progressively from south to north ; al- 
ways beginning each range with No. i ; and the ranges shall be 
distinguished by their progressive numbers to the westward. 
The first range, extending from the Ohio to the Lake Erie being 
marked No. i. The Geographer shall personally attend to the 
running of the first east and west line ; and shall take the lati- 
tude of the extremes of the first north and south line, and of 
the mouths of the princii^al rivers. 



250 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" The lines shall be measured with a chain ; shall be plainly 
marked by chaps on the trees, and exactly described on a plat, 
whereon shall be noted by the surveyor, at their proper dis- 
tances, all mines, salt-springs, salt-licks, and mill-seats, that 
shall come to his knowledge ; and all water-courses, mountains 
and other remarkable and permanent things, over and near 
which such lines shall pass, and also the quality of the lands. 

" The plats of the townships respectively, shall be marked 
by subdivisions into lots of one mile square or 640 acres, in the 
same direction as the external lines, and numbered from i to 
36 ; always beginning the succeeding range of the lots with the 
number next to that with which the preceding one concluded. 
And where, from the causes before mentioned, only a fraction- 
al part of a township shall be surveyed, the lots, protracted 
thereon, shall bear the same numbers as if the township had 
been entire. And the surveyors, in running the external lines 
of the townships, shall, at the interval of every mile, mark cor- 
ners for the lots which are adjacent, always designating the 
same in a different manner from those of the townships. 

"The Geographer and surveyors shall pay the utmost atten- 
tion to the variation of the magnetic needle ; and shall run and 
note all lines by the true meridian, certifying, with every plat, 
what was the variation at the times of running the lines thereon 
noted." ' 

As soon as seven ranges were surveyed, the Geographer 
should transmit the plats to the Board of Treasury, to be 
carefully recorded ; and so for every succeeding series of sev- 
en ranges. It was made the duty of the Secretary of War, 
from time to time, to take by lot from the whole number of 
townships and fractional townships making up each series of 
seven ranges, as well those to be sold entire as those to be sold 
in lots, one-seventh of the whole, for the use of the Continen- 
tal Army ; until enough land should be drawn to satisfy the 
claims arising under the resolutions of Congress, adopted Sep- 
tember 16 and 18, 1776, and August 12 and September 22, 



'Journals of Congress, IV., 520. 



THE LAND ORDINANCE OF 1785. 251 

1780. The Board of Treasury should cause the remaining 
numbers " to be drawn for in the name of the thirteen States 
respectively, according to the quotas in the last preceding 
requisition on all the States," and should certify the results 
of such drawings to the Commissioners of the State Loan 
offices. The State Commissioners should now proceed to 
sell the lands at public vendue, after first advertising them, in 
the following manner : Townships i, 3, 5, etc., whole or frac- 
tional, in the first range, entire ; Nos, 2, 4, 6, etc., in the same 
range, in lots ; townships i, 3, 5, in the second range, in lots; 
Nos. 2, 4, 6, entire ; and so on, alternating throughout, pro- 
vided that no lands should be sold at a less price than one dol- 
lar an acre in specie or its equivalent in certificates of State 
or United States indebtedness, and the cost of surveying and 
other charges, which are rated at $36 a township. Lots Nos. 
8, 1 1, 26, 29, in all whole townships, and such of them as were 
found in the fractional townships, were reserved to the United 
States for future sale. The' ordinance also declared : " There 
shall be reserved the lot No. 16 of every township for the 
maintenance of public schools, within the said township ; also 
one third part of all gold, silver, lead, and copper mines to 
be sold or otherwise disposed of as Congress shall hereafter 
direct." 

The lands between the Scioto and Little Miami Rivers, 
that Virginia had contingently reserved, were excepted from 
the operation of the Ordinance. Three townships adjacent to 
Lake Erie were reserved for the use of the Canada and Nova 
Scotia refugees who had adhered to the cause of the colonies 
in the war, and lands on the Muskingum were reserved for 
the Christian Indians of Gnadenhiitten, Schonbrunn, and 
Salem. Deeds should be given for lands by the Loan Com- 
missioners of the States ; records of deeds should be kept in 
the loan offices ; and a regular system of accounting between 
the Federal and State authorities should be observed. All 
moneys received by the commissioners for the lands sold 
should be charci"cd to them. Provision was also made for dis- 



252 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tributing the lands reserved for bounties for service in the 
Continental army. 

Under this Ordinance, the Federal Government made its 
first land-surveys, the so-called " seven ranges " adjoining 
Pennsylvania, north of the Ohi® River, frequently mentioned 
in histories of Ohio. 

The Land Ordinance of 1785 is eminently characteristic 
of the time in which it was enacted. It is a curious medley 
of State and national ideas. In operation it would have 
been exceedingly complex and cumbersome. But its State 
features passed away when the Constitution went into opera- 
tion, while its national features are still alive. It contained 
the germs of our present admirable system of national land- 
surveys : Base-lines ; boundaries carefully run, measured, and 
marked according to a uniform plan ; the six-mile township 
and the " section ; " maps and plats, deeds and records. In 
no case was the land to be sold or otherwise disposed of 
before it had been surveyed. The greatest defect of the 
plan of survey was the lack of subdivisions smaller than a 
square mile, but this was afterward overcome. 

With all its defects, this Ordinance was perfection itself 
compared with the old colonial methods ; say, that of Virginia. 
Here the State made no surveys whatever before disposing of 
the lands to the settler or speculator. The prospective owner 
sought out a tract of land that pleased him, and caused a sur- 
vey to be made and marked, the latter generally by "blaz- 
ing " the trees with a hatchet. The survey was then recorded 
in the State land-office, and became the basis for warrants 
covering the land. Such was the way in which the lands of 
West Virginia and Kentucky were "taken up." The read- 
er of Washington's correspondence with Crawford finds it 
well illustrated in practice, and at the same time gets an in- 
sight into a phase of Washington's character. This method 
gave the greatest scope to settlement. The pre-emptor was 
never obliged to wait for the surveyor. Such a system led to 
the " running out " of all sorts of tracts of land. Half a dozen 



THE LAND ORDINANCE OF 1785. 253 

patents would sometimes be given for the same tract ; pieces 
of land, of all shapes and sizes, lay between the patents ; and 
in time, as lands became more valuable, huge "blanket" 
patents were thrown out to catch these pieces. Such a sys- 
tem naturally begot no end of litigation, and there remain 
in Kentucky curious vestiges of it, that Professor Shaler thus 
describes : 

" Of all these conflicts the Virginia, and, following it, the 
Kentucky land-office took no note. To this day one can, if he 
please to pay the costs, ' patent ' any land that lies in Ken- 
tucky, and repeat the process on the same area each year. The 
State only guarantees the entry if the land is unpossessed under 
previous title of valid kind. In time a vast amount of litiga- 
tion and no end of trouble came out of this scheme. At this 
moment, owing to the absence of records, there are hundreds 
of thousands of acres in Kentucky over which no sort of 
ownership has ever been exercised. No taxes are collected on 
them. If they have ever been surveyed, no one knows under 
what patents they are claimed." ' 

As it was, there was a sufficiency of land-litigation in the 
Northwest Territory ; but the first settlers and their descend- 
ants have the greatest reason to be grateful to the Old Con- 
gress for saving them from such confusion as Virginia suffered 
to come upon Kentucky. 

The system of surveys inaugurated did not extend to 
the Connecticut and Virginia reservations on the south- 
ern shore of Lake Erie and the northern bank of the Ohio. 
Every Ohioan can join with Dr. Andrews, of Marietta, in 
this opinion : " It would have been desirable if the system 
of uniform ranges, townships and sections, which commenced 
with the seven ranges in the summer of 1786, could have 
been carried out over the whole surface of the State ; avoid- 
ing the confusion of the five-mile system of the Western 

' Kentucky, 49, 51. 



254 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Reserve and the no-system of the Virginia Military Dis- 
trict." ' 

The reservation to Congress of one-third of the gold, silver, 
and copper came to naught ; but the dedication to the sup- 
port of public schools of lot No. i6 in every township was a 
far-reaching act of statesmanship that is of perpetual interest. 
It was the first and greatest of the long series of similar dedi- 
cations made by Congress to education ; and the funds de- 
rived from the sale of these original " school lands " are the 
bulk of the public-school endowments of the five great States 
of the Old Northwest. 

Note. — There has been some controversy as to the author 
of the plan of survey incorporated in the Ordinance of 1785. 
The late Colonel Charles Whittlesey accords the honor to 
Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, whose 
duties were similar to those now performed by the Surveyor- 
General of the Public Lands. Whittlesey says Hutchins con- 
ceived "this simplest of all known modes of survey " in 1764, 
when he was a captain in the Sixtieth Royal Regiment, and 
engineer to the expedition to Ohio, under Colonel Henry Bou- 
quet. It formed a part of his plan of military colonies north 
of the Ohio as a protection against Indians. The seven ranges 
were surveyed in 1786-87, under the protection of United States 
troops. The base-line of this survey, known as " the Geogra- 
pher's line," runs west from the north bank of the Ohio, where 
the State line crosses it, forty-two miles. 

Hutchins died at Pittsburg in 1788, where his remains now 
lie unnoticed, in the cemetery of the First Presbyterian 
Church. — Ohio Surveys, Tract No. 59, of Western Reserve and 
Northern Ohio Historical Society. 

' Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, 4, June, 1887. 



XV. 

THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 

TflE Ordinance enacted, July 13, 1787, for the Govern- 
ment of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the 
River Ohio is one of the memorable documents that passed 
the doors of the Old Congress. It ranks with the great State 
papers of 1774 and 1775, that won from Lord Chatham the 
encomium : " For solidity of reason, force of sagacity, and wis- 
dom of conclusion, under a complication of difficult circum- 
stances, no nation or body of men stand in preference to the 
General Congress at Philadelphia ; " with the Declaration of 
Independence, that should always hang, Lord Brougham said, 
in the cabinets of kings ; with, or rather above, the Articles 
of Confederation, that, with all their imperfection and weak- 
ness, still formed the first constitution of the American peo- 
ple, and contained the elements for the evolution of a more 
perfect union. 

The Ordinance of 1787 stands at the convergence of three 
series of important events. The first of these entered into 
many great questions of the time, as confederation, finance, 
the national boundaries, foreign relations. Western settlements, 
the Northwestern and Southwestern Territories, the admis- 
sion to the Union of Vermont as a State, the navigation of 
the Mississippi, and the fidelity of the Southwest to the 
Union. These events are the cessions that have already been 
treated, so far as they relate to the Old North west. Except 
the Western Reserve, and the lands that Virginia had re- 
tained in Southern Ohio to discharge her obligations to her 
soldiers, the four cessions gave the United States a clear title 



256 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

to the territory bounded by the Lakes, the Ohio, and the 
Mississippi. This was the original i^ublic domain. It was a 
territory in which all the States had a common interest ; it 
furnished national subjects of legislation ; and it prepared the 
way for the Constitution. The happy effects of the cessions 
upon the States, and upon the Nation, cannot be overesti- 
mated ; one of them being the escape from the difficulties 
attending any attempt to adjust the conflicting jurisdictions. 
These Northwestern cessions are the culmination of the first 
series of events leading up to the Ordinance. Moreover, 
they put the United States in what was really a very anom- 
alous position. The Articles of Confederation were " ar- 
ticles of confederation and perpetual union " among States ; 
and they no more contemplated a Federal territory to be 
managed by Congress than the Constitution of 1787 contem- 
plated the acquisition of territory beyond the boundaries of 
1783. To some extent,, no doubt, this fact explains the re- 
markable form of government that was devised for the 
Northwest. 

Previous to 1748, the English colonies had taken little in- 
terest in the interior of North America. After that all was 
changed. The Ohio Company, organized in 1748; the " Plan 
of Union," adopted by the Albany Congress of 1754; Dr. 
Franklin's comments on the " Plan," and his " Plan for set- 
tling two Western Colonies in North America," have all been 
fully treated in another place. Governor Thomas Pownall, 
who has been called the only British official, in the country 
who had a statesman-like grasp of colonial questions, favored 
what he called " barrier colonies," after the fashion of the 
marks and marches of the Middle Ages. Pownall wrote home : 
" If the English would advance one step farther, or cover them- 
selves where they are, it must be at once, by one large step 
over the mountains, with a numerous and military colony."' 
The coming on of the French and Indian war adjourned the 

' Sparks : Works of Franklin, III., 69. 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 257 

plans of the Ohio Company, of Franklin, and of Pownall, un- 
til the sword should decide to whom the West belonged; and 
even when the sword had rendered a verdict in favor of Eng- 
land, the proclamation of 1763 still further adjourned similar 
plans. But the paths that the wild deer had made over the 
mountains could not be blocked up. The hunter followed 
the deer, and the settler followed the hunter. Adventurous 
Pennsylvanians and Virginians began to enter the valleys 
leading to the Ohio ; James Robertson was at Watauga in 
1769, and John Sevier came soon after; Boone entered the 
Dark and Bloody Ground the same year; and when the em- 
battled farmers fired the shot heard round the world, a party 
of hunters in the valley of the Elkhorn heard the echo, and 
baptized the station that they were building " Lexington." 
It has been said that the English race has a hunger for the 
horizon. " Have not all America extended their back settle- 
ments in opposition to laws and proclamations ? " is a ques- 
tion that Judge David Campbell asked Governor Caswell, 
when the people of the back counties of North Carolina were 
trying to set up the State of Franklin. But sporadic settle- 
ments under the jurisdiction of the old States did not fill the 
ambition of the times ; and in less than three years from the 
signing of the royal proclamation the discussion of interior 
colonies was boldly renewed. Again Franklin bore a promi- 
nent part in the discussion. In 1766, 1767, and 1768 he 
pressed upon the home government a grant for a colony in 
the Illinois, and was refused. In 1769 he presented another, 
praying for a grant on the southern side of the Ohio. This 
time he was successful; the petition was granted in 1772, 
terms of government were agreed upon, and the charter was 
made ready for the seals, when the breaking out of the war 
with England again adjourned Western colonies to more 
peaceful times. 

All through the Revolution the over-mountain settlements 
were slowly ii^rowing ; the Maryland amendment of 1777, and 
the Congressional resolutions of 1780, kept the thought of new 

17 



258 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

and independent States before the country ; and with the re- 
turn of peace, the acknowledgment of independence, and the 
concession of the Lakes and the Mississippi as our northwest- 
ern and western boundaries, together with the land-cessions,, 
the hour of preparation for planting the West with new 
States struck. There was no time to lose if the West was to 
remain in our hands ; for the Briton and the Spaniard con- 
tinued to retain considerable portions of our territory, and 
neither looked upon the boundaries of 1783 as finalities. In his 
well-known letter to Governor Harrison, Washington wrote 
in 1784: "The flanks and rear of the United States are 
possessed by other powers, and formidable ones, too;" it is 
necessary to " apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of 
the Union together by indissoluble bonds ; " " the Western 
States stand, as it were, upon a pivot — the touch of a feather 
would turn them any way." ' 

On the 1st of March, 1784, the very day that Virginia 
completed her cession, Mr. Jefferson, as chairman of a com- 
mittee, reported to Congress a temporary plan of govern- 
ment for the Western territory; and this plan, variously 
amended, became an ordinance of Congress on April 23d fol- 
lowing. This ordinance did not organize a Territorial govern- 
ment, but left everything inchoate ; and, with all its merits, 
was a nullity, and was repealed by the Ordinance of 1787. 
Between April 23, 1784, and July 9, 1787, as many as three 
ordinances for the government of the Western territory were 
reported to Congress: May 10, 1786, September 19, 1786, 
and April 26, 1787. These ordinances, one and all, were 
quite different documents from the one whose history we 
are now tracing. On May 10, 1787, the last one had reached 
the third reading, when its further progress was suddenly 
arrested by a third series of events that we must now follow. 

But first, the facts now related in regard to new States and 
governments are the second series, at the junction of which 



' Sparks : Writings of Washington, IX., 62, 63. 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 259 

with the two others we find the Ordinance for the Govern- 
ment of the Northwest Territory. 

November 2, 1783, Washington took leave of the rank and 
file of the Continental army, and two days later, of the ofificers. 
He left both in a most distressful condition ; the majority 
were poor, many broken in health ; they were all unpaid, and 
Congress could do no more than give them the " final cer- 
tificates " that were almost worthless ; eight years of suffering 
lay behind, and they knew not how many more of poverty 
before. In that dark hour some of them looked beyond the 
Western mountains for a theatre where they might repair 
their broken fortunes, as they had in darker hours often looked 
there as a place of retreat from the enemy in case of over- 
whelming disaster ; and Washington, in his final order, had 
cheered them with these words : " The extensive and fertile 
regions of the West will yield a most happy asylum to those 
who, fond of domestic enjoyment, are seeking for personal 
independence,"* Even before that order was issued, a plan 
for forming a new State westward of the Ohio was in con- 
templation; and on June 16, 1783, two hundred and eighty- 
five ofificers of the Continental line of the army had petitioned 
Congress to assign and mark out the tract of land bounded by 
Lake Erie on the north, Pennsylvania on the east, the Ohio 
on the south, a meridian twenty-four miles west of the mouth 
of the Scioto, and the Miami of the Lakes on the west, as 
the seat of a distinct colony of the United States, " in time 
to be admitted one of the confederated States of America." * 
The petitioners also asked that their bounty lands be set off 
to them in this district. This petition was really the foun- 
dation of the Ohio Company of Associates, organized at the 

' Sparks : Writings of Wasliington, VIII., 493. 

' Of tlie two liundred and eighty-five names, two hundred and tliirty-five be- 
longed to New England, thirty-six to New Jersey, thirteen to Maryland, and one 
to New York. The New England names belonged, one hundred and fifty-five to 
Massachusetts, thirty-four to New Hampshire, and forty-six to Connecticut. 
— Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, June, 1887, 46. 



26o THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

*' Bunch of Grapes," in Boston, March 3, 1786. This organ- 
ization meant, as has been well said, " The conversion of those 
old final certificates into future homes, westward of the Ohio," 
and " the formation of a new State." The directors sent 
one of their number. General S. H. Parsons, of Middletown, 
Conn., to Congress to negotiate the purchase of a tract of 
land ; and it was his arrival in New York, May loth, that 
arrested the progress of the ordinance that had been reported 
the previous month. Parsons presented his memorial, which 
was referred to a committee, and returned home. His place 
was shortly taken by Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of Ipsv/ich, Mass. 
Cutler reached New York on July 5th, the day before the 
pending ordinance was to be taken up. The few days fol- 
lowing his waiting upon Congress are big with the issues of 
futurity. They are the convergence of the three lines of 
events that we have been following — the land-cessions, the 
growing interest in Western colonization, and the objects of 
the Ohio Company — where we find the immortal Ordinance. 
" Dr. Cutler's ostensible business in New York was to pur- 
chase as much of the land bounded by the petition of 1783 as 
Congress would exchange for $1,000,000 of the evidences of 
the public debt. But he was really as much interested in the 
ordinance that Congress was then considering as in the me- 
morial of General Parsons ; for what would homes be worth 
to New England men without good government ? He seems, 
indeed, to have had almost as much to do with the one as 
with the other. It is impossible and unnecessary to give in 
detail the history of those eventful July days, but a rapid 
summary of events is essential to our purpose. 

Only eight States were then present by their delegates in 
Congress — Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, 
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. On 
the 9th of July the ordinance of April precedini^ was re- 
ferred to a new committee — Carrington and Lee of Virginia, 
Dane of Massachusetts, Kean of South Carolina, and Smith 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 261 

of New York — three of them Southern men. On the loth, 
Dr. Cutler, in response to an invitation of the committee, 
submitted in writing his views touching an ordinance ; on the 
I ith, the committee reported ; and on the 13th, after receiving 
some amendments, the report was adopted by the unanimous 
vote of the States present, and the unanimous vote of the 
eighteen delegates, with the exception of Yates of New York. 
Thus, an act of legislation that had been before Congress for 
more than three years was consummated within a week from 
the time that Dr. Cutler, who had been twelve days on the 
way, drove his gig up to the " Plough and the Harrow," in 
the Bowery. 

Admirable in matter and in literary style as the Ordinance 
is, its provisions arc not arranged with that careful method 
which Gouverneur Morris gave to the Constitution of the 
United States. I shall make no attempt at classification be- 
yond remarking that the Ordinance created a machinery of 
government for immediate use, defined the method and spirit 
of its administration, provided for the creation of the long- 
promised new States, and established certain principles of 
civil polity that should be of perpetual obligation. 

Section i constituted the Territory one district for tempo- 
rary government, but reserved to Congress the power to divide 
it into two districts in the future. 

Section 2 ordained that landed estates in the Territory, of 
persons dying intestate, should be divided among the chil- 
dren of the intestate, or if none, among the next of kin, in 
equal shares. This provision Jefferson had introduced into 
the Ordinance for Western lands that he reported in 1784, and 
that Congress never acted upon, in the words : " The lands 
therein shall pass in descent and dower according to the cus- 
toms known in the common law by the name of gavelkind." 
It adds interest to the fact to recall that, not long before, en- 
tails and primogeniture had been eradicated from the laws of 
Yirginia. 



262 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Sections 3 to 12, inclusive, created a Territorial govern- 
ment, and directed how it should be administered. Congress 
should appoint a governor for a term of three years, a secre- 
tary for a term of four years, and three judges for good be- 
havior. Until the election of a general assembly, the gov- 
ernor and judges should adopt and publish in the district such 
of the laws, civil and criminal, of the original States as they 
deemed necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the 
people, subject to the approval of Congress. The governor 
should be commander-in-chief of the militia, should appoint 
and commission militia officers below the rank of general 
officers, and appoint such magistrates and other civil officers 
in counties and townships as he deemed necessary to the 
maintenance of peace and good order. The secretary's duties 
are sufficiently indicated by his title. Any two of the judges 
should form a court having a common-law jurisdiction. A 
general assembly was authorized as soon as there should be five 
thousand free male inhabitants, of full age, in the district. The 
legislature should consist, when formed, of a governor, a legis- 
lative council, and a house of representatives ; the representa- 
tives to be chosen by the people, but the five members of the 
council to be chosen by Congress from a list of ten nominated 
by the house of representatives. The legislature should elect 
a Territorial delegate to Congress. All the officers must re- 
side in the Territory. The governor must own a freehold of 
1,000 acres of land in the district; the secretary, the judges, 
and the members of the council must have similar freeholds 
of 500 acres each ; representatives must hold, in their own 
right, 200 acres of land in the district, and no man was a 
qualified elector of a representative, the only elective office, 
unless he filled the following requirement : " That a freehold 
in 50 acres of land in the district, having been a citizen of one 
of the States, and being resident in the district, or the like 
freehold and two years' residence in the district, shall be nec- 
essary to qualify a man as an elector of a representative." 

What havoc these rules would make with the leg-islatures 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 263 

and electoral bodies of to-day ! They were intended to con- 
fine the government of the Territory to those men wlio had, 
as Enghshmen say, " a stake in the country." Moreover, they 
were in accord with the temper of the times, and they stand 
on the statute-book of 1787 a landmark from which we may 
measure how far the American people have drifted on the 
tide of democracy since that day. The whole government 
was centralized to a degree that would not now be endured 
anywhere in the United States unless in Alaska. 

Then follow the articles of compact between the original 
States and the people and States in the Territory, forever un- 
alterable, unless by common consent — the six bright jewels in 
the crown that the Northwest Territory was ever to wear. 

Article I. declares that " No person demeaning himself in 
a peaceable and orderly manner shall ever be molested on ac- 
count of his mode of worship or religious sentiments, in the 
said Territory." 

Article II. guarantees to the inhabitants the writ oi habeas 
corpus, trial by jury, proportional representation in the legis- 
lature, and the privileges of the common law. The article con- 
cludes with the declaration " That no law ought ever to be 
made or have force in the said Territory that shall, in any 
manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts, or 
engagements bofia fide, and without fraud previously formed." 
A few weeks later, this provision was copied into the Consti- ( 
tution of the United States, but this is its first appearance in f 
a charter of government. It was an outgrowth of the troub- | 
lous commercial condition of the country. Lee, who origi- 
nally brought it forward, intended it as a stroke at paper 
money. 

Article III. contains those words that should be embla- 
zoned on the escutcheon of every American State : " Religion, 
morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government 
and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of edu- 
cation shall forever be encouraged." It also says that good 
faith shall be observed toward the Indians. 



264 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Article IV, ordained " That the said Territory, and the 
States which may be formed therein, shall forever remain a 
part of this Confederacy of the United States of America, sub- 
ject to the Articles of Confederation, and to such alterations 
therein " as might be made, and to the laws enacted by Con- 
gress. It concludes, after some provisions in regard to taxa- 
tion : " The navigable waters leading into the Mississippi and 
St. Lawrence, and the carrying places between the same, shall 
be common highways, and forever free, as well to the inhab- 
itants of the said Territory as to the citizens of the United 
States, and those of any other States that may be admit- 
ted into the Confederacy, without any tax, imposts, or duty 
therefor." 

Article V. provided for the formation in the Territory of 
States, not less than three nor more than five, and drew their 
boundary-lines subject to changes that Congress might after- 
ward make. A population of 60,000 free inhabitants should 
entitle every one of these States to admission — not " into the 
Union," a phrase that came in with the Constitution, but — - 
" by its delegates into the Congress of the United States, on an 
equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever," 
and to " form a permanent constitution of State government," 
with the proviso that " the constitution and government so 
to be formed shall be republican, and in conformity to the 
principles contained in these articles." 

Article VI. dedicated the Northwest to freedom forever. 
" There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in 
the said Territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes 
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." But this 
prohibition was coupled with a proviso that stamps the whole 
article as a compromise. " Provided always, that any person 
escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully 
claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be 
lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his 
or her labor or service as aforesaid." 

Dr. W. F. Poole says that " in the whole range of topics 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 265 

in our national history there is none which has been more ob- 
scure, or the subject of more conflicting and erroneous state- 
ments, than the Ordinance of 1787." ' Much labor and acute- 
ness have been devoted to the discovery of the authorship of 
its different parts. I shall neither emulate these labors nor 
particularize their results, but shall content myself with three 
or four observations. 

We have seen that four different ordinances had been 
previously reported to Congress, and that one had already 
been enacted. The fifth and great Ordinance, as Mr. Ban- 
croft says, embodied the best parts of all its predecessors. 
But it embodied more ; and all the evidence points to the 
conclusion that much of the new material was contained in 
the paper that Dr. Cutler handed to the committee, July lOth, 
after he had studied the ordinance then pending. Whoever 
may have brought them forward, the imperishable principles -V 
of polity woven into the Ordinance of 1787 were the ripe 
fruit of many centuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization ,''''^but the 
best places to search for them are the bills of rights of the 
Revolutionary constitutions. 

The immortal prohibition of slavery has been the subject 
of many a heated controversy. In the " great debate " of 
1830, Mr. Webster claimed it for Nathan Dane, of Massachu- 
setts, and Mr. Hayne and Mr. Benton claimed it for Thomas 
Jefferson. Mr. Dane claimed it for himself. President King 
of Columbia College claimed it for his father, Rufus King. 
William Grayson and Richard Henry Lee have also been 
nominated for the honor. The facts are these : Mr. Jeffer- 
son's draught of the Ordinance of 1784 contained a prohibition 
of slavery in all Western territory, south as well as north of the 
Ohio River, to take effect at the beginning of the year 1801, 
but it was struck out in Congress. In March, 1785, Mr. King 
moved to commit a proposition to prohibit slavery in the 
Northwest immediately ; the motion prevailed, but Congress 

' North American Review, No. 251. 



266 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

never acted upon the subject. The first draught of the Ordi- 
nance of 1787 did not contain the prohibition ; but Mr. Dane, 
who was a member of the committee of July 9th, and who 
wrote that draught, brought it forward on the second read- 
ing, apparently on a suggestion from Virginia, and it was 
made the sixth article of compact. The value of Rufus 
King's suggestion will appear when we come to study, 
farther on, the efforts afterward made in Ohio, Indiana, and 
Illinois to break the prohibition down, and when we reflect 
upon the enormous power that slavery would have had in 
the Northwest provided it should gain a firm foothold. Once 
that prohibition had been voted down, and once it had been 
set aside ; it had been rejected by Southern men when Mr. 
Jefferson first brought it forward, and now five of the eight 
States present are Southern States and eleven of the eighteen 
men Southern men, and it prevails. 

We have now traced the main events that led up to July 
13, 1787; but we should also observe that at last the Ordi- 
nance could not have been secured, as it is, had it not been 
^for the happy constitution of Congress at that time, for the 
address of Dr. Cutler in conducting his mission, and for the 
blessed influences of peace and wisdom that brooded over 
America in that year. 

But Dr. Cutler came to New York to buy land? Strange 
to say, the land-purchase was attended by more trouble 
than the ordinance of government; but on July 27th Con- 
gress authorized the sale of 5,000,000 acres lying north 
of the Ohio, west of the seven ranges, and east of the 
Scioto River, 1,500,000 for the Ohio Company, and " the 
remainder," to quote Dr. Cutler's diary, "for a private 
speculation in which many of the principal characters of 
America are concerned." The total price agreed upon was 
three and a half millions of dollars, but as the payments 
were made in public securities worth only twelve cents 
on a dollar, the real price was only eight or nine cents 
per acre. 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 267 

" The Ordinance of 1787 and the Ohio purchase," says Mr. 
Poole, " were parts of one and the same transaction. The 
purchase would not have been made without the Ordinance, 
and the Ordinance could not have been enacted except as an 
essential condition of the purchase." The meaning of this is, 
that the New England men would not buy the land unless a 
satisfactory government was secured, and that Congress would 
not have enacted the Ordinance had it not been for the 
opportunity to make a large sale of lands. This alone makes 
the sale and purchase memorable, but it is memorable for 
other reasons. The agent who negotiated it says it was " the 
greatest private contract ever made in America," up to that 
time. Besides, the " Powers to the Board of Treasury " au- 
thorizing the sale contain some features that rank with those 
of the Ordinance itself. The Land Ordinance of 1785 re- 
served lot No. 16 in every township, or a thirty-sixth part 
of the whole West, for the maintenance of public schools 
within the township ; and the " Powers " reaffirmed the reser- 
vation. Other kindred provisions were these: The lot No. 
29 in each township or fractional part of a township to be given 
perpetually for the purposes of religion ; not more than two 
complete townships to be given perpetually for the purposes of 
a university, to be laid off by the purchaser or purchasers, as 
near the centre as may be, so that the same shall be of good 
land, to be applied to the intended object by the legislature 
of the State. These two townships of land are the endow- 
ment of the Ohio University at Athens. Once more, it was 
in consequence of the Ordinance and the purchase that Mari- 
etta, the first colony in the Northwest Territory, was planted 
at the mouth of the Muskingum, April 7, 1788. 

No act of American legislation has called out more elo- 
quent applause than the Ordinance of 1787. Statesmen, his- 
torians, and jurists have vied with one another in celebrating 
its praises. In one respect it has a proud pre-eminence over 
all other acts of legislation on the American statute-books. Tt 
alone is known by the date of its enactment, and not by its 



268 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

subject-matter. It was more than a law or statute. It was a 
constitution for the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. 
More than this, it was a model for later legislation relating to 
the National Territories ; and some of its provisions, particu- 
larly the prohibition of slavery, stand among the greatest prec- 
edents of our history. The sixth compact was the old-time 
platform of the Republican Party previous to 1861. 

The record of the vote on the Ordinance shows eighteen 
delegates present in Congress. As we look over the list, we 
are surprised to see how few of them ,have any place in his- 
tory. 

Massachusetts, Holten and Dane ; New York, Smith, 
Harring, and Yates ; New Jersey, Clark and Sch6urman ; 
Delaware, Kearny and Mitchell ; Virginia, Grayson, Lee, and 
Carrington ; North Carolina, Blount and Hawkins ; South 
Carolina, Kean and Huger ; Georgia, Few and Pierce. We 
must remember, however, that the Old Congress was not 
now what once it had been; also that the Federal Convention 
was sitting at Philadelphia, and that Franklin, Sherman, 
King, Hamilton, the Morrises, Madison, Rutledge, the Pinck- 
neys, Randolph, Wilson, and Washington were in attendance 
there. The ease with which the Ohio Company carried its 
proposition through Congress has been the subject of sur- 
prise for a hundred years. No doubt the explanation con- 
sists largely in the fact that the new colony was proposed by 
a body of men fully able to make it successful. Contrasting 
it with earlier propositions, Mr. Bancroft says : 

" For vague hopes of colonization, here stood a body of 
hardy pioneers, ready to lead the way to the rapid absorption 
of the domestic debt of the United States ; selected from the 
choicest regiments of the army ; capable of self-defence ; the 
protectors of all who should follow them ; men skilled in the 
labors of the field and of artisans ; enterprising and laborious ; 
trained in the severe morality and strict orthodoxy of the New 
England villages of that day. All was changed. There was 
the same difference as between sending out recruiting officers 



THE ORDINANCE OF 17S7. 269 

and giving marching orders to a regular corps present with 
music and arms and banners." ' 

But, after all, one cannot help thinking that the silence 
and celerity with which the Ordinance was enacted was 
partly due to the fact that the Federal Convention was in 
session. Men's eyes were fixed upon the statesmen who were 
discussing in secret the National Constitution ; and Grayson 
and Lee and Carrington and Dane, assisted by Manasseh 
Cutler, were left with fourteen men, all but one of whom 
were willing to follow them, to enact in serenity and stillness 
an ordinance of government that might not have been se- 
cured if New York and not Philadelphia had been the focus 
of public attention. The year 1787 is thus doubly memor- 
able ; it gave us the Ordinance for the Territory Northwest 
of the River Ohio, and the Constitution of the United States. 

" Peace hath her victories 
No less renowned than war ; " 

and History may yet adjudge that year the greatest in our 
annals.2 

1 History, VI., 285. 

^ The hterature relating to the Ordinance of 1787 is voluminous. For the 
part that Dr. Cutler bore in the matter, see his Life, Journals, and Correspon- 
dence, Cincinnati, 1888; Life of Ephraim Cutler, Cincinnati, 1890; Dr. W. F. 
Poole, Dr. Cutler, and the Ordinance of 1787, The North American Review, 
No. 251. The "private speculation " mentioned by Dr. Cutler in his Journal 
was the Scioto Company. See Cutler's Life, Journals, and Correspondence, 
chap. xii. ; The Archaeological and Historical Publications of Ohio, Columbus. 
Vols, in., TV. C. B. Todd, Life and Letters of Joel Barlow, N. Y., 1886, and 
Winsor, The Westward Movement, Boston, 1897. 



XVI. 

THE TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES 
NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 

The region beyond the Ohio that the Virginia troops and 
the American Commissioners at Paris wrested from England, 
that the four States ceded to the Nation, and that Congress 
constituted a district for the purposes of government in 1787, 
of itself is a noble physical base for an empire. It contains 
265,878 ' square miles of land to Austria-Hungary's 240,943, 
Germany's 212,091, France's 209,091, Great Britain and Ire- 
land's 120,874, and Italy's 114,296. Triangular in form, its 
sides are washed by about three thousand miles of navigable 
waters. The Great Lakes, one of which reaches its very cen- 
tre, contain nearly one-half the fresh water of the globe. The 
volume of the waters of the Mississippi is equal to that of 
three Ganges, of nine Rhones, of twenty-seven Seines, or 
eighty Tibers, or of all the rivers of Europe, exclusive of the 
Volga.^ The Ohio, one thousand miles in length, is one of 

' The territory northwest of the River Ohio contained an area of 265,878 
square miles, and from it were formed and now lie in its original territory — 

Square Miles. 

The State of Ohio 3g, 964 

" " ''Indiana 33> 809 

" " " Illinois 55,414 

" " "Michigan 56,451 

" " Wisconsin 53,924 

Minnesota, east of the Mississippi River and international 

boundary of 1783, estimated to contain 26,000 

" Erie Purchase (in Pennsylvania) about 316 

Grand Total, 170,161,867 acres.— Donaldson : The Public Domain, 161. 
* Carnegie : Triumphant Democracy, 301. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 2/1 

the largest affluents of the Mississippi. The rivers flowing' 
to these three water-ways render every part of the interior of 
the Northwest easily accessible ; and some of them, as the 
Wabash, the Illinois, and the Wisconsin, are small streams 
only because they appear in such noble company. The sur- 
face is exceedingly favorable to the construction of canals and 
railroads; and such are the geographical relations of the re- 
gion to the remaining parts of the country that it gathers in 
its grasp nearly all the great lines of transportation and travel 
uniting the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean. With 
a very large proportion of arable land unsurpassed in fertility 
and adapted to a wide range of productions ; rich in forests of 
hard and soft woods ; the waters abounding in fish ; abundant 
in coal, iron, and lead, copper, oil, gas, and salt, it is the fit 
home of the great people who are making its history. 

On July 13, 1787, this great domain was an unbroken 
wilderness. By far the larger number of the few inhabitants 
were savages, who were resolved that the wilderness should 
remain unbroken. Passing by the roving hunters and traders, 
the few Americans then making a small beginning at New De- 
sign on the Mississippi, and the occasional Moravian mis- 
sionaries, the French colonists, not five thousand in number, 
were the only civilized population. x\s ^lichigan was in the 
hands of the British, the habitants of the Illinois and the 
Wabash, who had practically been without government since 
1784, were the only people on the ground calling for a gov- 
ernment. However, the Territory was not established for the 
resident population. A new colonial period was opening, 
promising grander results tli^n the old one. The Ordinance 
of 1787 and the Powers to the Board of Treasury take rank 
with the colonial charters of one hundred and fifty years be- 
fore. The magnificent territory that the Indian had for cen- 
turies put to uses but little superior to those of the buffalo, 
the bear, and the wolf; that the Frenchman had used for pur- 
poses but little higher than those of the Indian ; and that the 
Englishman had refused to use at all, was now to be devoted 



272 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

to the greatest of human objects — was now to become the 
home of a progressive people excelling in all the arts of civil- 
ized life. 

The apex of the Northwestern triangle points to the east ; 
two of its sides face the Atlantic slope ; but causes now to 
be pointed out made the Ohio River the seat of the earliest 
settlements. 

The census-takers of 1790 found in the United States a pop- 
ulation of 3,929,214 souls, and the number was not much less 
in 1788. All of this population, save about five per cent., was 
distributed along the seaboard from Maine to Georgia, pre- 
senting an average depth of settlement, in a direction at right 
angles to the coast, of two hundred and fifty-five miles. This 
was the population that the Northwest was first to draw upon ; 
for the days of European emigration had not then dawned. 

General Walker, the superintendent of the tenth census, 
has pointed out that, in the early census-years, population 
moved westward along four main lines : (i) Through Central 
New York, following the valley of the Mohawk .River; (2) 
across Southern Pennsylvania, Western Maryland, and North- 
ern Virginia, parallel to and along the course of the Upper 
Potomac; (3) southward down the Valley of 'Virginia, and 
through the mountain-gaps into Tennessee and Kentucky; 
(4) around the southern end of the mountains, through Geor- 
gia and Alabama.' These movements were along the original 
lines of communication, surveyed by Nature ages before man 
appeared on the continent. The Great Lakes lie in the first 
of these directions, and they afterward became a main 
thoroughfare of emigration ; but, at the time of which we 
write, no road had been cut through the wilderness of Western 
New York to Lake Erie, and as late as 1796 the surveyors of 
the Connecticut Land Company reached that lake by the 
Wood Creek portage. Lake Ontario, and the Niagara portage. 



' Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, June 
30, 1880, xiii. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 273 

Nor had population then advanced on this line west of the 
interior New York lakes. Besides, the country above the 
head of Lake Erie was in the possession of England, and her 
garrison at Detroit would have turned back adventurous 
pioneers as promptly as Du Lhut turned back the Dutch 
traders at the close of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, 
the Lake Basin was thought less inviting than the Ohio Valley. 
On the second line, the situation was very different. In the 
French War two practicable roads were built over the moun- 
tains : The Braddock Road, cut through from the Upper Po- 
tomac in 1755, and the Forbes Road of 1758. These two 
roads connected the Ohio with tide-water, one at Alexandria 
and the other at Philadelphia. Accordingly, when the advent- 
urer or the pioneer had once reached the Monongahela or the 
Alleghany, the whole West lay open before him, and he had 
but to descend the " beautiful Ohio " to his chosen destination. 
Then, in the years just preceding the Revolution, Finley, 
Harrod, and Boone had discovered the natural highway lead- 
ing from the mountain-gaps near the southern line of Vir- 
ginia to the fairest region of Kentucky. Moreover, the rela- 
tions of the Ohio Valley to the country east and south were 
such that it necessarily received the full streams of popu- 
lation which the second and third of these channels soon 
began to discharge. In fact, settlers moving west by these 
two roads had reached the bank of the Ohio River at points 
as distant as the Forks and the mouth of the Kentucky 
before the Massachusetts men had thought of an Ohio col- 
ony at all. 

The five per cent, of the total population of 1790 not found 
on the Atlantic Plain was distributed in little islands almost 
lost in the wilderness-ocean of the West. Four of these is- 
lands lay on the border of the new Territory. The first, con- 
taining 63,218 people, was in Southwestern Pennsylvania; the 
second and third, containing together 55,873, were in Western 
Virginia, clustered around Wheeling and the mouth of the 
Kanawha ; the fourth was in Kentucky, below the Licking 
18 



274 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

River, and contained ^^^^77 souls. From the close of King 
George's War, when the colonies began to awaken to their 
Western interests, the Virginians had surpassed all their com- 
petitors in Western enterprise ; but they were closely followed 
by the Marylanders and Pennsylvanians on the north and 
the Carolinians on the south. These causes together explain 
the sources of the four clusters of settlements found south of 
the Ohio River in 1790. Nearly all of the settlers, excluding 
those born on the soil, came from those parts of the country 
east of the mountains, south of New York and north of South 
Carolina. A man living in 1787, possessing all these facts, and 
also observing the great relative disadvantage of New Eng- 
land in the Western competition, growing out of her remote- 
ness from the scene of operations, as well as the fact that 
New York had a "West" within her own limits, should 
have been able to indicate the principal sources of the popu- 
lation that, in the first period of its history, flowed into the 
country beyond the River Ohio. We shall soon find the 
facts of history justifying the prophecy that this remark 
implies. 

In one sense the whole Northwest below the head of Lake 
Erie was open to the Ohio Company of Associates in 1787^ 
but, practically, only the Ohio Valley. It made choice of lands 
on both sides of the Muskingum, but mainly below that stream. 
Three men appear to have controlled the location. In 1785 
General Benjamin Tupper, one of the State surveyors under 
the Land Ordinance of that year, came west as far as Pitts- 
burg, where he was stopped by the Indian hostilities then 
raging. But he had caught a glimpse of the Western vision, 
and he returned to New England, his imagination iiUed with 
pictures of Western possibilities. The same year General Sam- 
uel Holden Parsons, a Revolutionary veteran, descended the 
Ohio to the Falls ; he, also, returned on fire with Western en- 
thusiasm. The reports made to their old comrades in the 
East by Tupper and Parsons furnished much of the motive 
power that kept the new-colony enterprise moving, as well 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 275 

as tended to fix its seat on the Ohio rather than on Lake Erie. 
Thomas Hutchins, the Geographer of the United States, who 
probably had a more definite knowledge of the West than 
any other man living at the time, determined its precise loca- 
tion. He advised Cutler, to whom he was introduced in 
New York, to choose the Muskingum, which he considered 
the most favorable location in the West for the purposes of 
the company, and his advice was decisive. The choice was 
the more fortunate for the reason that Fort Harmar — a fort 
large enough to receive a garrison a regiment strong, built at 
the confluence of the two streams to protect passengers on the 
Ohio, to overawe the Indians, and to furnish armed escorts 
for the surveyors at work on the seven ranges — had been com- 
pleted in the spring of 1786. The contract, signed by Samuel 
Osgood and Arthur Lee, of the Board of Treasury, for the 
United States, and by Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sar- 
gent for the company, bounded the purchase, east by the sev- 
enth range of townships, south by the Ohio, west by the 
eighteenth range, and north by an east and west line far 
enough back from the Ohio to include 1,500,000 acres of land. 
Five hundred thousand dollars was paid at the date of the 
contract. The company not being able to pay in full the 
second moiety, further legislation was had, which reduced 
the quantity of land actually patented, not including reser- 
vations, to 1,064,285 acres.^ 

How well matured were the plans of the Associates is 
shown by the fact that the advanced guard of the colony 
reached the Youghiogheny, January 23, and the second divi- 
sion February 14, 1788. Here they built boats for descending 
the Ohio on the opening of navigation in the spring. From 
the deck of a row-galley, appropriately named the " May- 
flower," General Rufus Putnam, a hero of two wars and one 
of the prominent promoters of the colony, stepped to the bank 
of the Muskingum, April 7, 1788. Forty-seven other sons of 

1 Andrews: Washington County and the Early Settlement of Ohio, 16-18. 



2-j6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

New England landed at the same time. Felling trees, build- 
ing houses, laying out a city, and the erection of a stockade, 
called " Campus Martins," began at once. In the course of 
the year one hundred and thirty-two men, including fifteen 
families, arrived. This was a modest and unpretentious be- 
ginning, but, with the pressure of General Putnam's foot on 
this new soil, the present order of things in the Old North- 
west began. 

Meantime, the steps necessary to the setting up of the new 
government were being taken. On October 5, 1787, Congress 
elected General Arthur St. Clair governor, and Winthrop 
Sargent secretary, of the new Territory ; afterward Samuel 
Holden Parsons, James M. Varnum, and John Cleves 
Symmes were chosen judges. St. Clair was a veteran soldier 
of both the French and Revolutionary Wars, a trained civilian 
and an accomplished gentleman, a sterling patriot, a friend of 
Washington, and president of Congress at the passage of the 
Ordinance. A Scotchman by birth, he had come out an 
officer in one of the British regiments in the time of the 
French War ; he was a lieutenant under Wolfe at Quebec ; 
and made Western Pennsylvania his home soon after the 
coming of peace. We have already met him in that region in 
the troublous times that preceded the Revolution. Secretary 
Sargent was from Massachusetts, and a man of many abilities 
and accomplishments ; soldier, civilian, a member of learned 
societies, and a poet. Parsons was from Connecticut, and Var- 
num from Rhode Island ; both were distinguished soldiers 
and able lawyers. Judge Symmes had been a member of 
Congress and Chief Justice of New Jersey. Parsons and 
Varnum soon died, and their places were taken by George 
Turner and Rufus Putnam. 

Independence Day was duly celebrated at the mouth of 
the Mu.skinguni; and the expectant state of the colony, as 
well as the grandiose eloquence sometimes indulged in by 
the Revolutionary orators, is well illustrated by this extract 
from the oration delivered by Judge Varnum : 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 2^1 

"We mutually lament that the absence of his Excellency 
will not permit us, upon this joyous occasion, to make those 
grateful assiuances of sincere attachments, which bind us to 
him by the noblest motives that can animate an enlightened 
people. May he soon arrive. Thou gently flowing Ohio, 
whose surface, as conscious of thy unequaled majesty, reflecteth 
no images but the grandeur of the impending heaven, bear 
him, oh, bear him safely to this anxious spot ! And thou, 
beautiful, transparent Muskingum, swell at the moment of his 
approach, and reflect no objects but of pleasure and delight." ' 

Governor St, Clair landed at the Muskingum bank, July 
9th, and was received with appropriate civic and military 
honors; the 15th of the same month, attended by Secretary 
Sargent and Judges Parsons and Varnum, he made his public 
entry at the bower, in the city, where he was received by 
General Putnam, at the head of the citizens, " with the 
most sincere and universal congratulations." The Governor 
made a short address ; Secretary Sargent read the Ordi- 
nance and the commissions of the officers. The Governor 
then made a longer address. The citizens applauded, the 
concourse broke up, the wheels of government began to re- 
volve, and civil life began. 

On July 26th the Governor created Washington County, \^ 
the oldest county in the' Northwest ; and a little later ap- 
pointed magistrates and established a Court of Quarter Ses- 
sions. The Judiciary was formally inaugurated, September 
2d, with impressive ceremonies, A procession marched from 
Fort Ilarmar to one of the block-houses of Campus Martins, 
where the judges took their seats on the high bench ; Dr, 
Manasseh Cutler, who was on a visit to the colony, offered a 
fitting prayer ; the commissions of the judges and officers 
of the court were read ; and then, with the sheriff's proclama- 
tion, "O, yes! a court is open for the administration of even- 
handed justice to the poor and the rich, to the guilty and 

' St. Clair Papers, I., 139. . "^f^^ 



278 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the innocent, without respect of persons ; none to be punished 
without trial by their peers, and then in pursuance of the laws 
and evidence in the case" — the judicial history of the Territory 
began. Paul Fearing was admitted as an attorney, the first 
lawyer in the Northwest. 

Such, briefly told, is the story of the founding of Marietta, 
named for the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, and the institu- 
tion of civil government in the Northwest Territory. Not even 
the Pilgrim colony of 1620 was made up of better elements. 
At the distance of a century, no fitter eulogy upon the men 
who constituted it can be given than Washington's : " No col- 
ony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices 
as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. In- 
formation, property, and strength will be its characteristics. 
I know many of the settlers personally, and there were never 
men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a com- 
munity."^ One difference between French and American 
colonization in the Northwest is strikingly shown by the 
fact that on April 7, 179S, when Marietta was founded, 
the village at Saut Ste. Marie was one hundred and twenty 
years old. 

Another land-purchase, second only to that of the Ohio 
Company, was made in 1787 — the Miami purchase or Symmes 
Tract of one million acres, lying on the north bank of the Ohio 
between the two Miami Rivers.^ Three colonies were planted 
in this tract in the year 1788 : Columbia, at the mouth of the 
Little Miami ; Losantiville, opposite the mouth of the Lick- 
ing River; and North Bend, at the farthest northern sweep 
of the Ohio west of the Kanawha. For a time every one of 
these settlements aspired to the leadership ; but the second, 
founded December 24, 1788, having been chosen as the seat 
of a military post, and also as the county seat of Hamilton 
County, rebaptized by St. Clair Cincinnati, a name borrowed 



^ Sparks: Writings of Washington, IX., 385. 

2 The tract was not fully paid for, and only about one-third of it was patented. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 279 

from the celebrated society of Revolutionary officers of 
which he was a prominent member, soon outstripped both its 
competitors. Here lived the Governor, and here sat the first 
Territorial Legislature, Still, its growth was slow ; and when 
Judge Burnet first saw it, in 1796, it gave faint promise of 
becoming what it now is in name, and what it long was in 
fact, the Queen City of the West, The buildings were few 
and poor ; the population, including the garrison, was about 
six hundred ; and the social habits of the place anything but 
commendable.' 

Those philosophers who trace all historical phenomena to 
physical causes may read a suggestive lesson in the history of 
the Miami purchase. The location of North Bend is as favor- 
able as that of Cincinnati. It was the home of Judge Symmes, 
and the first station of the troops detailed by General Har- 
mar to protect the Miami pioneers. Unfortunately, before a 
permanent fortification was constructed the commanding of- 
ficer of the troops became enamored of the black-eyed wife 
of one of the settlers'. The jealous husband's removal to 
Cincinnati led to the prompt discovery, on the part of the 
officer, of the superior military advantages of that location ; 
whence resulted not the walls of lofty Rome, but the walls of 
Fort Washington and the ascendancy of the town named for 
the Cincinnati, 

As in the case of the Muskingum colony, a very large 
number of the Miami settlers had seen service in the War of 
Independence. They were from no single locality, but Middle 
States men seem to have predominated — some of the most 
prominent from New Jersey. The Virginia Military District, 
embracing six thousand five hundred and seventy square 
miles of the fairest part of Ohio, became the seat of a third 
group of settlements, the founders of which came from Vir- 
ginia, These were later, mainly owing to the Indian War, 
than the settlements of the Ohio and Miami purchases. Gen- 

' Burnet : Notes on the Settlement of the Northwest Territory, 35 ct seq. 



28o THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

eral Nathaniel Massie and Duncan McArthur, afterward Gov- 
ernor of Ohio, laid out the town of Chillicothe, soon made 
the capital of Ross County, on the west bank of the Scioto, in 
1796. These Virginia colonies drew to themselves numbers 
of very able men, and they exercised a marked influence upon 
the nascent society of the Northwest, and particularly of 
Ohio. 

The Virginia Military District is often mentioned in con- 
nection with the Connecticut Western Reserve. Beyond the 
fact that both were reservations, they have no points of like- 
ness and many of unlikeness ; Virginia's reservation was condi- 
tional and special, Connecticut's absolute and general. 

Virginia voted her soldiers upon Continental and State es- 
tablishment liberal land-bounties. She also set apart for this 
purpose the lands bounded by Green River, Cumberland 
Mountains, the Tennessee line and Tennessee River, and the 
Ohio. In her act and deed of cession of the Northwest, Vir- 
ginia stipulated that, in case these lands should prove insuffi- 
cient for the purpose, the deficiency should be made up to the 
said troops in good lands, to be laid off between the Rivers 
Scioto and Little Miami. The Cumberland lands did prove in- 
sufficient for the purpose. Congress having been apprised of 
this fact, it passed a law in 1790 directing the Secretary of War 
to make return to the Governor of Virginia of the names of the 
Virginia officers and men entitled to bounty-lands, and the 
amount in acres due them. The same act authorized the agents 
of the said troops to locate and survey for their use, between the 
two rivers, apparently in the old Virginia fashion, such a number 
of acres of land as, together with the number already located 
on the waters of the Cumberland, would make the amount to 
which they were entitled ; these locations and surveys to be 
recorded, together with the names of those for whom they 
were made, in the ofifice of the Secretary of State. The 
President was then directed to issue letters patent for these 
lands to the persons entitled to them, for their use or the use 
of their heirs, assigns, or legal repi-esentatives. The Secretary 




THE 

[ HISTOKICAL DIVISIONS 



Wayne's treaty line and the Geographer's line do not really meet, but 
nearly so. This, however, was purely accidental ; neither line has any 
historical connection with the other. 

All the divisions marked on this map are explained in the text, except 
the Congress lands. These are so called simply because they were sur- 
veyed and sold in the ordinary way, pursuant to the land legislation of 
Congress. The Seven ranges, the Ohio purchase, and the Symmes' tract, 
like the Congress lands, were surveyed into six-mile townships; the Mili- 
tary bounty lands, like the Western Reserve, into five-mile townships ; the 
Virginia military district, not according to any system whatever. ^ 



l This map is reproduced from The History and Civil Government of Ohio, by B. A. 
and M. L. Hinsdale, published by the Werner School Book Company. 



282 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

of State should forward these deeds to the Executive of Vir- 
ginia, to be delivered to the proper persons. It will be seen 
that the National Government issued the deeds, but did not 
make the surveys. It is not surprising, therefore, that Dr. 
Andrews should speak of the " no system " surveys of the Vir- 
ginia Military District, and that Colonel Whittlesey should 
characterize the private surveys as " so loose as to be entirely 
useless for geographical purposes." Early in the history of 
the locations and surveys a dispute arose as to the Western 
boundary of the Virginia District. The United States held 
that it should be the Little Miami and a line drawn from the 
source of that stream to the source of the Scioto ; Virginia 
contended for a straight line drawn from the mouth of the 
one river to the source of the other. The first is called 
" Roberts's line; " the second, " Ludlow's line." Roberts's line 
was virtually established by a decision of the Supreme Court 
in 1824. No question of jurisdiction concerning this District 
ever arose between Virginia and the United States. In 1852 
Virginia released to the United States all lands in the Dis- 
trict not already located, in consideration of Congress having 
provided other lands for such of the Virginia claims as were 
not yet satisfied. In 1871 Congress ceded such of these lands 
as remained unappropriated, amounting to 76,735 acres, ap- 
praised at $74,287, to the State of Ohio, and the State, in 
turn, ceded them to the State University.' 

In fulfilment of its promises made in the course of the 
war, the National Government set apart a large tract for land- 
bounties lying south of Wayne's treaty line, west of the seven 
ranges, and east of the Scioto River. This tract, known as 
the United States Bounty Lands, embraces about four thou- 
sand square miles. 

As a separate chapter will be devoted to the Western Re- 
serve, it will not be noticed here, beyond the remark that it 
was the fourth centre of early colonization within the limits 



' Donaldson : The Public Domain, 233, 234. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 2S3 

of Ohio. Passing by some small tracts dedicated to various 
objects, the remaining lands within the present limits of Ohio 
were known as " Congress lands," because surveyed and sold 
under its authority. 

In Indiana and Illinois the French towns were the cen- 
tres of the new settlements. Kentucky and Ohio were at 
first naturally preferred by emigrants, and the growth of 
the two States beyond them Avas for many years exceed- 
ingly slow. Governor Reynolds, who made his home in Illi- 
nois in 1800, found in that State a white population of two 
thousand persons, one thousand two hundred habitants and 
eight hundred Americans.' These people were scattered along 
the Mississippi River from Kaskaskia to Cahokia, with a few 
about Peoria. Moreover, the emigration to Indiana and Illi- 
nois, in the first period, was almost wholly from the South. 
They lay not only within the current of emigration that 
poured down the Ohio Valley, but also within the stream of 
the one which passed through the gaps of the Cumberland 
Mountains and swept northwestward across the States of 
Tennessee and Kentucky. Many of these emigrants were na- 
tive Tennesseeans and Kentuckians. Mr. VVashburne tells us 
that the Kentucky emigration was by far the best, and that 
the North Carolinians who came to Illinois were mostly 
*' poor whites." ^ 

In the winter and spring of 1790 Governor St. Clair made 
a lengthy visit to the habitants of the Wabash and the Missis- 
sippi. Writing to the Secretary of War from Cahokia, May 
ist, he tells a moving tale of their condition. " They are the 
most ignorant people in the world ; " " there is not a fiftieth 
man that can either read or write;" though ignorant, they are 
the gentlest and best disposed people that can be imagined ; 
the distress at Vincennes and on the Mississippi is extreme.' 
In a long and very interesting report to the President, the 



' My Own Times, 20. ^ Sketch of Edward Coles, 69. 

* St. Clair Papers, II., 136-140. 



284 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Governor describes their situation still more fully. With great 
cheerfulness the people had furnished Clark's command with 
everything they could spare, "and often with much more than 
they could spare with any convenience to themselves ; " " most 
of the certificates for these supplies are still in their hands, un- 
liquidated and unpaid ; " following the conquest, " a set of men 
pretending the authority of Virginia embodied themselves, 
and a scene of general depredation and plunder ensued ;" " to 
this succeeded three successive and extraordinary inundations 
from the Mississippi, which either swept away their crops or 
prevented their being planted ; " all this was followed by the 
decline of the Indian trade, hostile Indian incursions, and the 
loss of the last corn crop by an untimely frost. That the 
terms of the Virginia Cession might be kept, and the public 
domain also be protected, Congress had directed surveys of 
the Kaskaskia and Vincennes lands to be made at the ex- 
pense of the claimants, a charge the Governor found them ill 
able to meet.' Father Gibault, who had rendered the Ameri- 
can cause such great services in the days of the invasion, laid 
before St. Clair a memorial in behalf of his people that 
arouses one's pity. 

Since 1763, and even since the time of Clark's arrival in 
the Illinois, the settlements had materially declined. The 
character of the government in the Virginia period is plainly 
hinted by St. Clair ; while in the six years following the ces- 
sion, although the people kept calling upon Congress for re- 
lief, there was no government at all. It was found very dif^- 
cult to adjust these decaying French communities — mere 
patches of the Middle Ages — to the aggressive life that ulti- 
mately overwhelmed them. For example they had, from the 
first settlement of the country, enclosed their small farms by 
common fences. There was great lack of surveys and rec- 
ords, and so of titles. The accumulated difficulties that grew 
out of such arrangements were in time referred to the Terri- 

' St. Clair Papers, II. , 164 et seq. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 285 

torial Legislature for settlement ; and we can well believe 
Judge Burnet when he tells us it was no easy matter to de- 
vise a remedy for a case so complex. "A plan, however, 
was devised, and made obligatory on all concerned, by an act 
which regulated the enclosing and cultivating of common 
fields, and which gave general satisfaction." ' 

The picture of the Detroit Jiabitants given by Burnet lacks 
the elements of picturesque beauty found in the chapters of 
Mr. Hubbard referring to a period forty years later. Burnet 
presents them as extremely ignorant and strongly supersti- 
tious ; treading the footsteps of their fathers, imitative, not 
seeming to know that improvements had been made in agri- 
culture since Noah planted his vineyard ; raising the same 
crops without variation, exhausting fields by poor tillage and 
then abandoning them ; throwing the barn and stable litter, 
so much needed by the hungry soil, into the river ; and, 
withal, conscientiously exact in the performance of their re- 
ligious duties, regularly paying their tithes to the priest with 
cheerfulness, and constant in attendance at church." No 
doubt the man who would form a correct conception of this 
French civilization must take the two accounts together. 

It is impossible to follow carefully the development of 
the majestic civil life that has its springing point in the Mari- 
etta settlement. Attention \\\\\, however, be drawn to some 
of the principal questions that arose in the Territorial period. 

The question whether the Old Congress could successfully 
manage the Territory, keeping it in due relation to the Con- 
federacy and erecting the new States when the time should 
come, was happily adjourned by the adoption of the National 
Constitution. A brief act passed at the first session of the 
first Congress sufificed to effect the necessary adjustments of 
the Ordinance to the new government. This act put the Terri- 
torial officers, as respects their appointment and commissions, 
upon the same footing as the ofificcrs provided for by the Con- 

' Burnet : Notes, 307. ' Ibid., 281 et seq. 



286 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

stitution — nomination by the President and confirmation by 
the Senate. Afterward Congress authorized the Governor 
and Judges to repeal laws that they had once adopted, a 
power that the Ordinance had not conferred. 

One of the first duties with which Governor St. Clair was 
charged was the negotiation of a treaty of peace with the Ind- 
ians. All the Western Indians repudiated the second Treaty 
of Fort Stanwix, 1784; and the majority of them the Treaty 
of Fort Mcintosh, of the following year. In 1789 St. Clair 
concluded the Treaty of Fort Harmar with the Wyandots, 
Delawares, and several other tribes, whereby the tribes con- 
firmed the Treaty of Fort Mcintosh, and relinquished to the 
United States all lands, so far as they had a right to the same, 
east, south, and west of these lines : The Cuyahoga and Tusca- 
rawas Rivers, and the portage between them from Lake Erie 
to the forks above Fort Laurens; a straight line west from 
the forks to Loramie's on the Big Miami ; and a line from 
Loramie's to the Maumee, and then down the Maumee to 
the Lake. But the larger number of the Indians interested 
refused to be bound by this agreement. The Indians de- 
manded that the whites should retire beyond the Ohio ; and 
the long war that had devastated the frontier almost without 
cessation since 1755 continued to lengthen out the years. 
Harmar's, St. Clair's, and Wayne's invasions of the Indian 
country are told in every book of Indian warfare, and do not 
fall within the compass of the present work. The power 
of the Indians was broken for the time by Wayne's victory 
on the Maumee in 1794 ; and, by the Treaty of Fort Green- 
ville, entered into in 1795, they relinquished all the lands east 
and south of this series of lines : The Cuyahoga and Tus- 
carawas Rivers from the Lake to the forks above Fort Laurens ; 
a straight line drawn from this point to Loramie's ; thence to 
Fort Recovery on the Wabash ; and thence southwest to the 
Ohio opposite the mouth of the Kentucky River. This vic- 
tory gave the Northwest peace until the days Avhcn, just be- 
fore the War of 181 2, the Indians made, under the leadership of 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 287 

Tecumseh and the Prophet, another effort to stay the tide of 
invasion. The fondness of the Indians for this noble domain 
is shown by the long and determined stand that they made 
to retain it ; as the desire of the whites to possess it is, by 
their suffering and sacrifices in the long conflict. It is said 
that, in the seven years closing with 1790, one thousand five 
hundred and twenty men, women, and children, in Kentucky 
alone, were massacred by the Indians or carried away into 
slavery,' 

The Indian War materially retarded population, and also 
influenced its distribution. In 1795 Governor St. Clair, who 
had given careful attention to the subject, estimated the 
population under his jurisdiction at only fifteen thousand 
souls. The census-takers of 1800 reported finding, in the 
whole Northwest, 51,006 people. Kentucky, however, in- 
creased from 73,679 in 1790 to 220,955 in 1800. The geo- 
graphical relations of the Territory to the East, to the Middle 
States, and to the South rendered a mixed population a fore- 
gone conclusion. The New Englanders took the initiative, 
making their way across the Hudson and the Delaware, and 
through Pennsylvania, to the Forks of the Ohio. For a time 
the Indian War almost stopped the flow of emigration from 
New England ; and by the time that it began to move again 
the Western Reserve had been thrown upon the market in 
part, and thenceforth that region absorbed the larger number 
of the New Englanders who made their homes west of New 
York. But, even then, the Pennsylvania road by Pittsburg 
was preferred by many of the emigrants to the New York 
road by Buffalo. Had it not been for the renewed ferocity 
with which the war was waged after the Marietta settlement 
was made, New England would no doubt have contributed 
a much larger relative number to the first population of the 
Ohio Valley. It should be mentioned, to the great credit of 
the Ohio Company, that it contributed largely of its means 

' Cooley : Michigan, 31. 



288 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

to defend the infant settlements on the Ohio against the Ind. 
ians.* 

The Ordinance of 1787 made the Governor and Judges a 
temporary legislature, empowered not to enact laws but to 
" adopt and publish such laws of the original States " as they 
deemed necessary and fit, etc., reporting them to Congress 
from time to time ; said laws to continue in force until the or- 
ganization of the general assembly, " unless disapproved by 
Congress." This method of legislation was followed in con- 
stituting all the Territories carved out of the Old Northwest 
except Wisconsin, organized in 1836, and also in the act of 
1790 for the Territory South of the Ohio. Immediately this 
legislature set to work to provide a code of laws for the Ter- 
ritory, giving its attention, first of all, as was natural, to a mil- 
itia law ; but the history of its work will not be followed, 
except to point out two or three interesting features. 

First, the Governor and Judges did not confine themselves 
to adopting and publishing laws of the original States, but 
legislated de novo. This course they defended on the ground 
of necessity ; they could not find laws suited to all the wants 
of the Territory in the State statute-books. As Congress did 
not formally disapprove these laws, with one or two excep- 
tions, they continued in operation until set aside by the Ter- 
ritorial authorities. There being no proper capital, the leg- 
islature promulgated laws at various places, as Marietta, 
Cincinnati, and Vincennes. In June, 1795, the legislature 
took up the problem of a " complete system of statutory juris- 
prudence, by adoption from the laws of the original States, in 
strict conformity to the provisions of the Ordinance." By 
adopting an old Virginia statute of the colonial period 
" the common law of England, and all general statutes in aid 
of the common law prior to the fourth year of James I.," were 



See Services of the Ohio Company in Defending the United States Frontier 
from Invasion, an article by W. V. Cutler, in the Ohio Archceological and His- 
torical Quarterly, I., 293 et seq. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 289 

put in force in the Territory. "The other laws of 1795 were 
principally derived from the statute-book of Pennsylvania. 
The system thus adopted," continues Mr. Chase, whom we 
are here following, " was not without many imperfections and 
blemishes, but it may be doubted whether any colony at so 
early a period after its first establishment ever had one so 
good." ' Another difficulty was a difference of opinion be- 
tween the Governor and the Judges as to their respective legis- 
lative functions. Was the Governor simply one member of the 
legislature ? or was he a constituent part of it, having equal 
authority with the Judges as a whole ? The Governor vetoed 
drafts of laws submitted to him ; the Judges called his attention 
to the words " or a majority of them " in the clause of the Or- 
dinance relating to the adoption of laws, and he retorted, with 
no little force, that wherever the law-expounders are also the 
law-makers, the result is a tyranny. On this issue St. Clair 
had his way ; on another one he was less successful. 

The Ordinance gave the Governor power to appoint "such 
magistrates and other civil of^cers, in each county or town- 
ship, as he should find necessary," thus giving him, by impli- 
cation, the power to erect counties. The Governor, therefore, 
proceeded to constitute counties. While these counties were 
not as large as those that Virginia had bounded on the west 
by the South Sea, or even by the Mississippi River, they were 
still of truly imperial proportions. Washington County, for 
example, reached from the Ohio to Lake Erie, and from the 
Pennsylvania line to the Cuyahoga-Tuscarawas line and the 
Scioto. St. Clair County embraced all Southern Illinois. 
But Wayne County, organized in 1796, was the most exten- 
sive of all, including all the territory within the following 
limits: North by the international boundary line, east by the 
Cuyahoga, the portage-path, and the Tuscarawas ; south by a 
line reaching from the forks above Fort Laurens west to the por- 
tage of the Miami of the Ohio and the St. Marys ; thence north- 

1 Preliminary Sketch of the History of Ohio, in Statutes of Ohio, I., 26, 27. 
19 



290 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

west to the portage between the Miami of the Lake and the 
Wabash, where Fort Wayne now is, and thence northwest to 
the head of Lake Michigan ; and west by a line running north 
to the international boundary, including all the lands in Wis- 
consin draining eastward to the same lake. The original 
counties had to be divided into smaller ones, and the General 
Assembly, after 1799, claimed the power to make the sub- 
division. The Governor denied the Assembly's claim, and 
vetoed its bills erecting new counties, the result being a con- 
troversy that Avas finally carried to Congress, and decided 
against him. Much of the bitterness of this controversy is 
said to have been due to land-speculators, anxious to influ- 
ence the erection of counties and the location of county 
towns, who found Governor St. Clair standing in their way. 

The mingling of elements from all parts of the Atlantic 
slope in the new population, and particularly the appoint- 
ment of New England and Middle State men in about equal 
numbers to Territorial offices, decided the character of the lo- 
cal institutions now found in Ohio. Two radically different 
types of local government are found in the old States — the 
town system and the county system. As the names indicate, 
the first assigns the major part of political power to town or 
township officers, the second to county officers. These sys- 
tems, in their elements, are traceable to England, and perhaps 
to Germany. The town system naturally grew up under the 
conditions existing in New England in Colonial times; the 
county system, just as naturally under the conditions existing 
in Virginia. That the one would be more congenial to a civic 
democracy, the other to a landed gentry, goes withoht the 
saying. As is well known, Mr. Jefferson strove to introduce 
the New England system into Virginia, and made it the sub- 
ject of frequent eulogy. " These wards, called townships in 
New England," he said, in 1816, "are the vital principle of 
their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest 
invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exer- 
cise of self-government and for its preservation." Again, in 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 291 

1810 he speaks of" the large lubberly division into counties," 
of the Middle, Southern, and Western States "which can 
never be assembled." ' Local government in the Middle 
States is a compromise of the town and county systems; the 
county is more than in New England, and the town more 
than in the South. Governor St. Clair was from Pennsyl- 
vania, Judge Symmes from New Jersey, General Putnam 
from Massachusetts ; and the three established in the Terri- 
tory local institutions that are a sort of cross on the com- 
promise and town systems.'' 

Very serious evils grew out of the first land-policy that 
was adopted. The effect of that policy was the sale of 
the lands in large tracts to first purchasers, to be resold to 
settlers in lots suitable to their convenience. About one-half 
the State of Ohio was made up of large blocks of land 
ranging from the 1,000,000 acres of the Symmes purchase to 
the 4,209,800 acres of the Virginia Military District. In its 
undivided form the Virginia District, as well as the United 
States Bounty Lands, belonged to a large number of persons; 
but, through the sale and purchase of rights, the lands in both 
of them tended to work into the hands of large holders. In 
1800 Governor St. Clair called the attention of the legislat- 
ure to this state of things. He said in his address that the 
lands had generally been held by a few individuals in large 
quantities, who had sold them out in small parcels on credit ; 
that in some of the counties the majority of the people, un- 
able in the midst of the general poverty to meet their engage- 
ments, were debtors to the proprietors; and that this state 
of things gave creditors a dangerous power over the votes of 
debtors. He therefore suggested whether the substitution 
of election by ballot for election viva voce would not be "the 
best way of guarding against that not improbable evil." ^ 
No attention was paid to this suggestion until the year 1802, 

' Jefferson : Works, VII., I3 ; V., 525. 
^ Andrews : Washington County, 32. 
^ St. Clair Papers, II., 501 et seq. 



292 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

when it was adopted in the Ohio constitution ; but competi- 
tion and the inabiHty of the great land-owners to hold their 
tracts tended to diminish the danger that the Governor had 
pointed out. 

But there were practical evils of a serious character con- 
nected with the land-system. At first Congress did not it- 
self propose to sell lands save in large tracts, like the Ohio 
and Symmes purchases. The Land Ordinance of 1785 created 
a very complicated machinery for effecting sales. It author- 
ized the Loan Commissioners of the several States to sell at 
public vendue lands in townships of 23,040 acres, and in sec- 
tions of 640 acres, in equal quantities; it made no provision 
for land-of^ces in the Western country ; and it fixed the 
minimum price at one dollar an acre and the cost of survey, in 
specie or its equivalent. Under the Constitution successive 
acts of legislation corrected the evils growing out of these 
features of the Ordinance of 1785 so effectually as to create 
other evils of the opposite character almost equally great. 
The survey and sale of half-sections, quarter-sections, and 
then of smaller lots were authorized. In 1800 the minimum 
price of lands was advanced to $2 an acre on a long credit, 
or $1.64 in cash. Land-ofifices were established and multi- 
plied. No doubt the credit system facilitated settlements, 
but it led to great abuses and much suffering. In 1820, if 
we may trust Judge Burnet, more than half of the men 
northwest of the Ohio River were in debt to the Government ; 
and it was feared that an attempt to enforce payment, by a 
forfeiture of the land, under the laws of Congress, would pro- 
duce resistance, and probably terminate in a civil war. A 
similar state of things existed in the Southwest. In response 
to a perfect snow-storm of memorials calling for relief. Con- 
gress, in 1 82 1, by enacting that purchasers indebted to the 
Government might relinquish lands they could " not pay for, 
receiving credit on lands not relinquished for moneys actually 
paid in, relieved the general distress. That act paid more 
than $20,000,000 of debts ; while the sore experience that led 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 293 

to it caused Congress to reduce the price of lands to Si. 25 an 
acre, with payment in advance.' 

When Judge Burnet began to practise law in the Territory 
the General Court, which consisted of the three judges pro- 
vided for by the Ordinance, who received each a salary of $800, 
sat in four places : Marietta, Cincinnati, Vincennes, and Kas- 
kaskia. Soon after, Detroit was included within the circuit. 
This court had power to review and to revise the decisions of 
all inferior tribunals, but from its own decisions there was no 
appeal, not even to the Supreme Court of the United States. 
The Judges spent about as much time in the saddle as on the 
bench. Court and bar travelled through the wilderness, five 
or six together, sometimes seven or eight days on a single 
journey, with a pack-horse to transport the supplies that they 
could not carry on their own horses or purchase by the way. 
When purchasing a horse, one of the first questions was 
whether he was a good swimmer.^ But that was the day 
when the mail was a week in going and coming between 
Marietta and Zanesville ; when the Postmaster-General 
sometimes filled up mail schedules and contracts with his own 
hand ; and when the principal means of transportation on the 
Ohio was the " Ark," invented by one Krudger on the Juniata 
River — a square, flat-bottomed vessel, forty feet in length by 
fifteen in breadth, six feet deep, covered with a roof of thin 
boards, accommodated with a fireplace, and carrying from two 
hundred to four hundred barrels of flour.' 

For a number of years the Territory was not vexed by 
party politics ; but in due time men began to divide along the 
line separating the two nascent political parties in the old 
States. In general. New England men tended to the Federal 
party and Southern men to the Republican party, while 
Middle State men were divided more equally. The facts of 
emigration already pointed out gave the party led by Mr. 



' Burnet : Notes, 450-454 ; Sumner : Andrew Jackson, 184. 

^ Burnet : Notes, 63-65. " Harris : The Journal of a Tour, etc., 30, 31. 



294 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



Jefferson a considerable advantage, and the democratizing in- 
fluences of the time, and particularly of the West, increased 
that advantage more and more. In searching for an explana- 
tion of the final triumph of the Republicans over the Feder- 
alists, Mr. Hildreth says the second " had their strength in 
those narrow districts where a concentrated population had 
produced and contributed to maintain that complexity of in- 
stitutions and that reverence for social order which, in pro- 
portion as men are brought into contiguity, become more ab- 
solutely necessaries of existence." These conditions existed 
at the close of the last century in New England, New Jer- 
sey, Maryland, Delaware, and tide-water South Carolina ; 
and here he finds represented " the experience, the pru- 
dence, the practical wisdom, the discipline, the conservative 
reason ■ and instincts of the country." " The ultra-demo- 
cratical ideas of the opposition " — that expressed the country's 
wishes, hopes, and especially theories, its passions, sympa- 
thies, antipathies, and its impatience of restraint — " pre- 
vailed in all that more extensive region in which the dis- 
persion of population, and the despotic authority vested in 
individuals over families of slaves, kept society in a state 
of immaturity, and made legal restraints the more irksome 
in proportion as their necessity was the less felt." These 
conditions were best represented by Virginia, the head and 
front of the Republican party. North Carolina, Georgia, 
Tennessee, and Kentucky followed Virginia; and "the rap- 
idly increasing backwoods settlements of all these States 
constantly added new strength to the opposition." The 
decision depended ultimately " on the two great and grow- 
ing States of Pennsylvania and New York ; and from the 
very fact that they were growing, that both of them had 
an extensive backwoods frontier . . . they both inclined 
more and more to the Republican side." ' Perhaps these 
most suggestive remarks do not accurately state the case be- 



' History, V., 415, 416. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO 295 

tween the two parties at the close of Mr, Adams's administra- 
tion ; but there is no question that the rapid growth of the 
new settlements, whether in the old States or in the West, 
from 1790 on, was a material cause of the final complete an- 
nihilation of the Federal party. The democratizing influ- 
ences were less strong in the region that soon became Ohio 
than in the slave-holding States south of the river ; but they 
were strong enough to give the Virginia party a decided as- 
cendancy for a full generation. The fact is — and a very im- 
portant fact, too — that the political temper of Western soci- 
ety, even north of the Ohio, was far more like that of the 
South than that of New England. 

As soon as the new political yeast began to work, men be- 
gan to complain bitterly of the centralization of the govern- 
ment provided by the Ordinance, and of the Governor's admin- 
istration. St. Clair's sense of justice, eminent public services, 
social qualities, and weight of character had made him a pop- 
ular officer as long as there was no politics in the district ; 
but henceforth his popularity continues to wane. He was a 
gentleman of the old school, and a Federalist ; his manners 
were those of cultivated circles ; he could not be, and did not 
wish to be, a Democrat ; he stood stoutly for the dignity and 
prerogatives of his ofifice ; he did' not trim his sails to the 
breeze that was now blowing stiffly from Virginia ; he com- 
mitted indiscretions of power, and incurred personal enmities, 
as a matter of course ; besides, and in consequence of the fore- 
going, on the exciting questions now coming to the front, he 
took the unpopular side. x^ 

In 1798 it was ascertained that the Territory had the five 
thousand free male inhabitants that the Ordinance had made 
the condition of the second stage of government. That 
stage it accordingly entered upon, the following year. The 
General x'-Vssembly first met for the transaction of business at 
Cincinnati, September 24, 1799. The Lower House con- 
sisted of twenty-two members representing nine counties. 
Seven of the number came from the four counties contain- 



296 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ingthe old French settlements in Michigan, Indiana, and Illi- ] 
nois, fifteen from the five Ohio counties. Hamilton County/^ 
alone, eleven years old, had the same number of representa- 
tives as the four French counties, more than a century old. 
Four of the five members of the Council were from Ohio 
counties, and one from Vincennes, William Henry Harrison, 
who had succeeded Mr. Sargent in the secretaryship, was 
chosen delegate to Congress, where he rendered his constit- 
uents much good service, particularly in procuring needed 
legislation on the subject of lands. The new order of things 
was quite different from the old. The Governor was no 
longer part of the legislature, but he had an unquestioned 
veto that he freely exercised, particularly in legislation relating 
to counties. His power was materially strengthened by the 
change, and his troubles proportionally increased. Moreover, 
the appearance of a legislature and a delegate in Congress 
greatly stimulated political activity, and from this time on to 
the admission of Ohio to the Union, events became more and 
more exciting. Section i of the Ordinance reserved to Con- 
gress the right, which it would have had otherwise, since it 
was not a subject of compact, to divide the Northwest into 
two Territories whenever circumstances might render it expe- 
dient. At the session of 1 799-1 800 the House of Represen- 
tatives referred the subject to a committee, of which Delegate 
Harrison was chairman. In a letter to Harrison, dated Feb- 
ruary 17, 1800, St. Clair recommended the formation of three 
Territories, the dividing lines to be the Scioto River, and 
a meridian line drawn through the mouth of the Kentucky 
River, with Marietta, Cincinnati, and Vincennes as capitals. 
This scheme, which was to continue only until the new States 
were formed, he supported with man}^ plausible arguments. 
The vision of a new State in the eastern part of the Territory 
was now rising full-orbed upon the sight of national states- 
men and Territorial politicians, and, as in many another simi- 
lar case, both statesmen and politicians were anxious that the 
State should come into the Union with the right kind of poli- 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 297 

tics. It was objected to St. Clair's scheme that it would 
postpone the formation of the State, which was true enough, 
and that his purpose was to carve out a Territory of which he 
could be governor for life, which was absurd. His scheme 
failed to command the support of Mr. Harrison, who was a 
State man, and of Congress, but it did not fail to add to St. 
Clair's growing unpopularity. On May 7, 1800, an act was 
approved constituting all that part of the Northwest lying 
west of the treaty-line of 1795, from the Ohio to Fort Re- 
covery, and a line drawn from the fort to the international 
boundary, a separate Territory, to be called Indiana Territory. 
The act made Chillicothe and Vincennes the two capitals, 
until otherwise ordained by the respective legislatures; and 
said, whenever the Territory east of the meridian of the 
mouth of the Great Miami River should become an inde- 
pendent State, thenceforth said meridian should be the 
boundary between the new Territory and such State. 

The Virginia colony in Ross County were very influential 
in bringing about this legislation. In fact, the original scheme 
of the Chillicothe managers was much more extensive, em- 
bracing these features: (i) The appointment of William 
Henry Harrison as Governor of the Indiana Territory; (2) 
the establishment of the permanent seat of government for 
the eastern district at Chillicothe; and (3) such alterations 
in the form of the Territorial Government as should vacate 
the offices.^ Of course, the programme included the retire- 
ment of St. Clair. Harrison did become the governor of the 
new Territory, and Chillicothe the temporary capital of the 
Eastern district; but, owing to the opposition of the Senate, 
the act of May 7th contained an express prohibition of change 
in the government of the old Territory other than its limitation 
in extent. Henceforth, until its final disappearance from the 
map, on February 19, 1803, the name Northwest Territory is 
limited to the eastern of the two Territories. The striking 

^ St. Clair Papers, I., 236. 



298 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

features of its history are the agitation of the State question 
and the growing embarrassments of Governor St. Clair. The 
census of 1800 reported a population of 45,916 in the Terri- 
tory, thus distributed by counties : Adams, 3,432 ; Hamilton, 
14,692; Jefferson, 8,766; Ross, 8,540; Trumbull, 1,302; 
Wayne, 3,757. 

Toward the close of his long administration there was a 
total want of agreement between the Governor and a majority 
of the people of the Territory in political ideas and temper. 
He was a pronounced Federalist ; they were pronounced Re- 
publicans. So extreme was he in his opinions that he wrote 
and published a pamphlet in defence of the Alien and Sedition 
Laws, which President Adams said was " masterly," written 
" in the style and manner of a gentleman, and seasoned with 
no more than was useful and agreeable of Attic salt." ' If 
seasoned to Adams's taste, it must have been pungent indeed. 
At this time the Federalists were taking those extreme meas- 
ures which conclusively showed that they did not understand 
the popular temper, and the Republicans were seeking to 
rescue the country from evils and dangers which they de- 
scribed in the most exaggerated language. To this extent, 
the strife in the Valley of the Ohio was simply a part of the 
bitter political controversy then going on in all the old States. 
Then some of the Governor's personal qualities were a source 
of criticism. Judge Burnet, who was an admirer of St. Clair, 
and a member of the same political party, says he placed too 
high an estimate on his own powers of mind, and, although 
modest and unassuming in society, very rarely yielded an 
opinion that he had once deliberately formed.' St. Clair was 
a Scotchman and a Federalist, holding a position of great 
power and responsibility in a young American democracy 
west of the Ohio River. Naturally, he became less yielding 
as he grew older, and assaults upon him became more fre- 
quent and bitter. But St. Clair's Federalism and obnoxious 



'St. Clair Papers, I., 234. « Burnet : Notes, 37S-381. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 299 

personal qualities alone would not have caused the opposition 
that he encountered. The question of a new State in the 
Eastern district of the Northwest was now coloring — and 
deeply coloring — all Territorial questions. Generally speak- 
ing, Federalists and Republicans divided on this subject. A 
resolution unanimously adopted by a delegate convention of 
the County of Washington, held at Marietta in June, 1801, 
expressed the common view of the one party, viz. : " That in 
our opinion, it would be highly impolitic, and very injurious 
to the inhabitants of this Territory, to enter into a State gov- 
ernment at this time." ' The Republican view, as expressed 
by a writer in the Scioto Gazette, was that such a change would 
be like opening the floodgates to a mill ; wealth would flow 
in, improvements would spring up, the streams would " roll 
along " food to thousands suffering from want, and arrange- 
ments for education would be perfected ; plains covered with 
herds and farms with crops would gladden the owners' hearts, 
and the government, like the tree of liberty, would extend its 
benign branches over the citizens, sheltering them from tyranny 
and oppression.'' One side objected that a State government 
would be costly, that the people could not pay the taxes, and 
that it was far better to allow the United States to pay the 
expenses of government than to impose them upon the citi- 
zens ; and the other side replied that the salaries now paid 
by Congress to the Governor and Judges amounted to only 
$5,500, that a State government would not cost more than 
$15,400 per annum, while the people were able to pay taxes 
amounting to $27,926.90 for the year 1801. Those were 
days of small things, in more senses than one. But beneath 
all these petty arguments was the great question of national 
politics. The elder Meigs said the Federalists opposed a new 
State because it meant three more Republican presidential 
electors and two more Republican Senators ; if he had added 
that the Republicans favored it for the same reason, as well 

'Andrews : Wnsliington County, 27. 'St. Clair Papers, I., 225, 226. 



300 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

as because there would be a number of State offices to be dis- 
tributed among the active politicians, he would then have told 
an equal amount of truth about both sides. St. Clair was the 
head and front of the Federal party. What Mr. Smith ' calls 
the "junto" had plenty of reasons for desiring to break down 
the Governor's influence or to drive him from the Territory. 
Men of to-day w'ho have been taught by historians that Arthur 
St. Clair was a thorough patriot, and by jurists that the Or- 
dinance of 1787 was a paragon of political wisdom, would find 
it hard to explain the language in which the extreme Repub- 
licans of the Territory habitually spoke of both, were they 
not also instructed in the capabilities for detraction of heated 
political partisans. Thomas Worthington, afterward Govern- 
or of Ohio, called St. Clair "Arthur the First," and spoke of 
the efforts to thwart him as efforts "to curb a tyrant." Gen- 
eral Darlington, speaking of the formation of the new State, 
said the people of Adams County " congratulated themselves 
on t'le prospect of having it soon in their power to shake off 
the iron fetters of aristocracy, and in the downfall of the Tory 
party in this Territory." ^ These " aristocrats " and " Tories " 
were Arthur St. Clair and the leading citizens of Marietta. 
The writer in the Scioto Gazette, already quoted, speaks of 
"the utter impossibility of a government conducive to national 
happiness in this enlightened day being administered under" 
the Ordinance, "unless by a person more than mortal," adding: 
" This government, now so oppressive, was prescribed by the 
United States at a time when civil liberty was not so well 
understood as at present, and when it could not be contem- 
plated but for the government of a few." Judge Symmes, one 
of the Governor's most determined foes, declared, " We shall 
never have fair play while Arthur and his Knights of the 
Round Table sit at the head." ' In some respects the best 
places to study the clash between the old political regime 



' The editor of the St. CLiir Papers. 

* Andrews : Washington County, 28. ^ gt. Clair Papers, I., 242. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 301 

and the democratizing movement headed by Jefferson are the 
new communities of the West. 

Postponing the State question to the next chapter, 
we shall now rapidly follow St. Clair's fortunes to the 
end. 

A determined but ineffectual effort was made to induce 
President Adams not to reappoint him on the expiration of 
his fourth term. No sooner was President Jefferson estab- 
lished in the chair than a still more determined effort was 
made to effect his removal. An indictment almost as formi- 
dable as the one preferred against George III. by the Conti- 
nental Congress was drawn up and forwarded to Washington. 
The principal charges contained in this paper, as formulated 
by General Massie and revised by General Worthington, 
are usurpations of legislative power, the abuse of the veto, 
receiving unlawful fees, attempting to dismember the Ter- 
ritory, to destroy its constitutional boundaries and so to 
prevent the formation of a State, endeavoring to influence 
the judiciary, obstructing the organization and disciplining of 
the militia for the defence of the Territory, and hostility to 
the form and substance of republican government.' Frag- 
ments of St. Clair's private conversation, taken down and duly 
authenticated by affidavits, were also sent to Washington. 
But Mr. Jefferson refused to move until St. Clair, by a char- 
acteristic act of indiscretion, himself gave a reasonable pre- 
text for so doing. On November ist the convention elected 
to frame a constitution for the State of Ohio sat, and on the 
3d, in reluctant response to his own request, the Governor 
was permitted to address that body, Burnet says the ad- 
dress was "sensible and conciliatory;" but no man read- 
ing it now, understanding the temper of the times and 
of the convention, would be apt to think it conciliator}'. 
This is the bolt that answered the Governor's unfortunate 
speech : 

' St. Clair Tapers, II., 566, 567. 



302 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

" Department of State, 

"Washington, November 12, 1802. 
"Arthur St, Clair, Esq. 

" Sir : The President observing, in an address lately deliv« 
ered by you to the convention held at Chillicothe, an intemper- 
ance and indecorum of language toward the Legislature of the 
United States, and a disorganizing spirit and tendency of very 
evil example, and grossly violating the rules of conduct en- 
joined by your public station, determines that your commission 
of Governor of the Northwestern Territory shall cease on the 
receipt of this notification. 

" I am, etc., 

" James Madison." ' 

And then, as though removal were not punishment enough, 
the Secretary of State sent this letter enclosed in one to Sec- 
retary Byrd, one of St. Clair's strongest enemies, directing that 
officer to assume the duties of the governor's office. Thomas 
Jefferson would have shown himself a larger man if he had 
overlooked the indiscretion of the Chillicothe speech and per- 
mitted the venerable Governor to remain at the head of the 
Territory the few weeks yet to elapse before it ceased to exist. 

St. Clair now retired to the home that he had made near 
Ligonier, Pennsylvania, in the interval between the French 
War and the Revolution. He had spent more than a quar- 
ter of a century in the continuous service of the country. He 
was sixty-eight years old. His private affairs had been sadly 
neglected in his devotion to public business. He had in- 
curred liabilities for the Government that the Government 
now refused to pay. What of his once considerable fortune 
remained, was swept away by his creditors. The handsome 
" Hermitage" that he had built and furnished in the days of 
his prosperity went with the rest, and he spent the remainder 
of his days in dignified poverty with his beloved daughter 
Louisa in a log-house standing beside the road leading to the 



' St. Clair Papers, I., 244-246. 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 303 

great Territory with which his name will ever be identified. 
The tardy pension voted him by Congress passed directly 
from the treasury to one of his creditors. Pathetic in the ex- 
treme are the glimpses that we have of his last years. Hon. 
Lewis Cass, who had known him in happier days, found the 
old soldier and civilian in his rude cabin eking out a liveli- 
hood by selling supplies to the wagoners on the road, and he 
described the scene as " one of the most striking instances 
of the mutations which chequer life." Hon. Elisha Whittle- 
sey, who visited him in 181 5, was profoundly impressed by 
the dignity and benignity of his character. " I never was in 
the presence of a man that caused me to feel the same degree 
of esteem and veneration. . . . Poverty did not cause 
him to lose his self-respect, and were he now living, his per- 
sonal appearance would attract universal attention.'" 

St. Clair died, August 31, 18 18, in consequence of being 
thrown from a wagon while going to a neighboring village. 
To him who is acquainted with St. Clair's history, the name 
always suggests a striking example of the ingratitude of men 
and of republics. 

The independent existence of Indiana Territory began July 
4, 1800. At first it included all that part of the old Territory 
lying west of the treaty-line of 1795 from the Ohio River to 
Fort Recovery, and of the meridian of the fort to the national 
limits. The act creating the Territory plainly contemplated 
the creation of only three States in the Northwest, for it pro- 
vided that, whenever the part of it east of the meridian pass- 
ing through the mouth of the Great Miami, from the Ohio to 
the territorial line, should be admitted to the Union as an in- 
dependent State, " thenceforth said line shall become and re- 
main permanently the boundary-line between such State and 
the Indiana Territory." But the Enabling Act for Ohio, 1802, 
bounded that State on the north by a due east and west line, 

^ St. Clair Papers, L, 253. 



304 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

from the Miami meridian to the international boundary, 
drawn through the southerly extreme of Lake Michigan, and 
added all territory north of such line, as well as between 
the meridian and the line of 1800, to Indiana. Again, in 
1804 Louisiana, extending from parallel thirty-three degrees 
north to the British dominions, and from the Mississippi 
River to the Rocky Mountains, was annexed to Indiana, but 
the next year was created an independent Territory. The act 
of 1800 continued the form of government created by the Or- 
dinance of 1787, and guaranteed to the people all the rights 
and privileges that the Ordinance secured to them. Vincennes 
was the capital, and William Henry Harrison the first gov- 
ernor, of the Territory. The population was five thousand six 
hundred and forty-one. It entered on the second stage of 
government in 1805. 

Michigan Territory was created January 11, 1805. It was 
bounded on the south by the parallel passing through the 
southerly extreme of Lake Michigan; west by a line extend- 
ing from the same extreme through the middle of the said 
lake to its northern extremity, and thence north to the national 
limits ; and north and east by the international boundary. 
The act creating the Territory continued all the governmental 
features of the Ordinance. Detroit was the seat of govern- 
ment, and General William Hull, the same who seven years 
later surrendered Michigan to the British arms, was appointed 
governor. The population reported in 1800 was two thou- 
sand seven hundred and fifty-seven. The Territory entered 
on the second stage partially in 1823, and fully in 1827. 

The next step in this process of Territorial evolution was 
the creation of the Territory of Illinois. The act of Febru- 
ary 3, 1809, separated it from Indiana Territory by the 
Wabash River from its mouth to Vincennes, and a due north 
line from that point to the territorial line between the United 
States and Canada. The form of government was that pre- 
scribed in the Ordinance, save in one feature ; a general as- 
sembly might be organized whenever satisfactory evidence 



TERRITORY NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO. 305 

should be given to the governor that such was the wish of a 
majority of the free-holders, " notwithstanding there may not 
be therein five thousand free male inhabitants of the age of 
twenty-one years and upwards." Ninian Edwards, at the time 
of his appointment Chief Justice of Kentucky, was the first 
governor; Kaskaskia was the capital; the population, in 1810, 
was twelve thousand two hundred and eighty-two. The Ter- 
ritory entered on the second stage in 1812. We must now 
return to Michigan. 

The Enabling Act for Indiana, April 19, 18 16, bounded 
that State on the north by an east and west line ten miles 
north of the southerly extreme of Lake Michigan. The En- 
abling Act for Illinois, April 18, 18 18, made the northern 
boundary of that State parallel of latitude 42° 30' north. 
The act also attached all that part of the Territory of Illinois 
lying north of this line to Michigan. An act, approved June 
28, 1834, attached to Michigan all the country extending west 
of the Mississippi to the Missouri and White Earth Rivers, and 
from the State of Missouri to the national boundary. Thus 
at its greatest extent the Territory reached from Lake Huron 
and the Detroit River to the Missouri, and from the States 
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri to Canada. 

The Territory of Wisconsin, created April 20, 1836, con- 
tained what was left of the Territory of Michigan after the 
State of that name was constituted. It embraced the region 
extending from a line drawn through the middle of Lake 
INIichigan to the Missouri and White Earth Rivers, and from 
Illinois and Missouri to the British possessions. A much 
greater innovation than that in the case of Illinois was now 
made in the form of government. The peculiar features of 
the Ordinance of 1787 were all abandoned, and a new and 
very elaborate model established, the first of its kind : A gov- 
ernor, a secretary, judges, etc., appointed by the President 
by and with the consent of the Senate ; a legislature, consist- 
ing of a council and house of representatives elected by the 
qualified electors of the Territory; and a delegate to the Na- 



306 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tional House of Representatives, elected in the same way. 
At the same time, Section 12 enacted that the inhabitants of 
the Territory should be entitled to all the rights secured to 
the people of the Territory of the United States Northwest of 
the River Ohio by the articles of compact contained in the 
Ordinance of 1787, and should be subject to all the conditions 
and restrictions in said articles imposed upon the people of 
the said Territory. The act approved June 12, 1838, constitut- 
ing the Territory of Iowa, limited Wisconsin on the west by 
the Mississippi River and a line drawn from its sources to the 
territorial line, but guaranteed to the new Territory all the 
rights, privileges, and immunities that the old one had en- 
joyed. 

Such, in outline, is the history of the first Territory, and 
the most important Territory, that the Government of the 
United States ever organized.^ 

1 Nathaniel Massie, a Pioneer of Ohio, a Sketch of his Life and Selections 
from his Correspondence. By David Mead Massie, Cincinnati, 1896. This 
work throws much light on early Northwestern history, and particularly on the 
contest of the Chillicothe Republicans, of whom Massie was a leader, with 
Governor St. Clair, and on the admission of Ohio to the Union. 

See also a Familiar Talk about Monarchists and Jacobins, W. H. Smith, 
Ohio Archasological and Historical Quarterly, Vol. 11. p. 180. 



XVII. 

THE ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN 
STATES TO THE UNION. 

The " pioneer thought " that Maryland laid before Con- 
gress in 1777 was the proposition that the Western territory- 
should ultimately be divided into new States, to be admitted to 
the Union on an equal footing with the original States, under 
the superintendence and jurisdiction of Congress. Such was 
the promise of the resolution of 1780, such one of the condi- 
tions of the Virginia deed of cession of 1784, and, so far as the 
Northwest was concerned, such the guarantee of the Ordi- 
nance of 1787. Kentucky and Tennessee had already been ad- 
mitted, in pursuance of that general line of policy. The pop- 
ulation of the Eastern division of the Northwest Territory 
had not reached the minimum established in 1787 by many 
thousands when, in 1802, the chiefs of the Democratic-Re- 
publican party at Washington, as well as in the Territory, de- 
cided that the time had come to bring in the State of Ohio. 

I. Ohio. 

This decision was hastened by a bill passed by the Terri- 
torial Legislature at the session beginning November 23, 1801, 
declaring the assent of the Territory to the following modi- 
fication of the Ordinance respecting the boundaries of the 
States when they should be formed : The eastern State to 
be bounded on the west by the Scioto River and a line 
drawn from the intersection of the river with the Indian 
boundary as fixed in 1795 to the western limit of the West- 
ern Reserve ; the middle State to be bounded on the west 



3o8 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

by a line drawn from the lower extremity of George Rogers 
Clark's grant at the Falls of the Ohio to the head of Chicago 
River, and that river and Lake Michigan ; the third to be 
bounded west by the Mississippi/ This was a Federal plan, 
and it incurred very serious resistance in the Lower House. 
Taking alarm at this move. General Worthington hastened to 
Washington, where he succeeded in giving matters a very dif- 
ferent shaping. 

Soon after the legislature adjourned, in January, 1802, a cen- 
sus was taken which found 45,028 persons of both sexes and 
all ages in the Territory. The next step w^as for the friends of 
the measure to petition Congress for admission. The special 
committee to which this petition was referred reported favor- 
ably thereon. The Houses promptly passed the appropriate 
bill, which received the President's approval and became a 
law, April 30th. These are the main features of this act : (i) 
The inhabitants of the Eastern division of the Territory were 
authorized to form. a constitution and State government, as- 
suming such name as they deemed proper, said State to be 
admitted to the Union on the same footing as the origi- 
nal States in all respects. (2) The boundaries of the State 
should be : East, the Pennsylvania line ; south, the Ohio 
River; west, the meridian of the mouth of the Great Miami ; 
north, a due east and west line drawn through the southern 
extreme of Lake Michigan, and the international boundary- 
line. Congress, however, reserved the right to annex to this 
State that portion of Michigan included within the territorial 
lines of 1800 — that is, about one-half the lower peninsula — 
or to dispose of it otherwise. (3) All territory included 
within the limits of 1800, that these lines did not embrace, 
was annexed to Indiana Territory. (4) All male citizens re- 
siding in the Territory, having certain prescribed qualifications, 
were authorized to choose representatives to form a conven- 
tion in designated numbers, county by county, on the second 

' Chase : Preliminary Sketch, 30. 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 309 

Tuesday of October ensuing. (5) The representatives thus 
chosen were authorized to meet in convention at Chillicothe 
the first Monday of November, 1802 ; which convention 
should determine, by a majority of its whole number, whether 
it were now expedient to form a constitution and govern- 
ment, and, if so, to form them, but if not, then to provide by 
ordinance for calling a second convention for that purpose ; 
said constitution, in either case, to be republican and not re- 
pugnant to the Ordinance. (6) Until. the next census the 
new State should be entitled to one member in the House of 
Representatives. (7) Three propositions were submitted to 
the convention which, if accepted, should bind the United 
States : The grant to the State of section No. 16 in every 
township for the use of schools, the grant of certain salt- 
springs, and the grant of one-twentieth part of the net pro- 
ceeds of all lands sold by Congress within the State, to be 
applied to building roads connecting the Eastern and the 
Western waters ; provided, the State would exempt from 
taxation all such lands for the term of five years from the 
date of sale. 

This was the first "enabling act," so called, ever enacted 
by Congress. It was, however, the model of many succeeding 
acts of a similar nature. It is, therefore, a curious question, 
and one that cannot be very satisfactorily answered, how far 
its leading features were due to a statesmanlike study of the 
subject, and how far to political exigencies. The act did not 
contain a gleam of what was afterward called " popular sov- 
ereignty." The Territorial Legislature was wholly ignored. 
Neither the legislature nor the people themselves were asked 
to pass upon the question of entering into a State govern- 
ment. The sole function of the electors was to vote for 
members of the convention, in the manner prescribed by Con- 
gress. The opposition did not fail to put these points very 
strongly, as the bill was on its way through the House of 
Representatives. Mr. Griswold, of Connecticut, declared 
that the bill " went to a consolidation and destruction of all 



3IO THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the States ; " that the districting of the Territory and the ap- 
portionment of the members was arbitrary and unjust ; that 
the whole scheme was beyond the power of Congress and an 
invasion of popular rights ; and that the next thing would be 
a similar dictation to the States already in the Union. In 
the Territory, the opponents of the measure said these features 
of the bill were due to the fear of the party managers that the 
legislature and the people could not be trusted. There is 
probably some truth^n this charge ; but the framers of the 
Ordinance had created a centralized government, and the feel- 
ing was still strong, notwithstanding the complaint that West- 
ern Democrats made of their " colonial government," that 
there was a very wide difference between a Territory and a 
State, even when the time came to frame a constitution. 
" Popular sovereignty " was due to that progress of democratic 
ideas which the peopling of the West did so much to facili- 
tate. 

Other objections were strongly urged. Mr. Fearing, the 
Territorial delegate, said Congress had exhausted its power 
when it consented to the admission of the State before its 
population reached sixty thousand. He argued, also, that Con- 
gress could not divide the district, admitting part at one time 
and part at another ; that the division proposed would throw 
Lake Erie out of the State; and that the great distance of the 
Michigan people from Vincennes would make their annexa- 
tion to Indiana exceedingly inconvenient. Mr. Bayard, of 
Delaware, urged that the population of the State, as bounded, 
would not exceed thirty-nine thousand ; that this was a 
smaller number than any State in the Union then had ; and 
that Wayne County should come in with the rest of the dis- 
trict, subject to the reserved right of Congress to alter the 
boundary afterward. Mr. Griswold said that not less than 
$40,000 would be devoted to roads, a " sum too large to be 
withdrawn from the national treasury and devoted to local 
objects ; " but Mr. Fearing thought one-half the proceeds of 
the lands should be given to build roads within the Territory, 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 31 1 

and a proposition to that effect actually commanded twenty- 
five votes. It was also objected that Mr. Gallatin, the Sec- 
retary of the Treasury, owned lands that would be benefited 
by these improvements. The friends of the bill replied 
to these arguments as best they could. Mr. Giles, of Vir- 
ginia, made the very just observation that a glance at the map 
sufificed to show that the boundary of 1800, running from the 
Ohio to the Straits of Mackinaw, was necessarily temporary^ 
and that the State as bounded by the bill was one of the 
most compact and convenient in the Union. An analysis of 
the vote in the House of Representatives shows the sources 
of the anxiety to bring the State into the Union at an early 
day. The 47 affirmative votes came : Twenty-six from the 
South, 14 from the Middle States, and 9 from New England ; 
the 29 negative votes came : Nine from the South, 5 from the 
Middle States, and 15 from New England, Virginia gave 15 
votes for and one against the bill ; Massachusetts, 5 for and 5 
against ; Connecticut, none for and 5 against. This vote is 
one of many proofs that, at the opening of the century, the 
Middle and Southern States were far more in touch with the 
West than New England. The vote of Dr. Manasseh Cut- 
ler, then a member of the House from Massachusetts, is reg- 
istered in the negative. 

The battle fought in the House of Representatives was 
fought over again with the same weapons in the Territory. 
The exclusion of Wayne County caused the deepest dissatis- 
faction to all Federalists, and particularly to the people of 
the county, most of whom were Federalists. A letter writ- 
ten to Judge Burnet by Mr. Solomon Sibley, of Detroit, 
August 2, 1802, puts the case very strongly. Annexation to 
Indiana will be the " eternal ruin " of the county ; but the 
ruin of five thousand people is of little consequence to the 
half-dozen political aspirants who have brought things to the 
present pass. The exclusion of the county was due to Judges 
Symmes and Meigs, and " Sir Thomas," as he calls General 
Worthington, who foresaw that its people would be " a dead 



312 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

weight against them." ' Politics may have been the cause of 
the peculiar grievance of the people of Detroit, which was, 
no doubt, a considerable one for a time ; but in the end it 
was most fortunate that the five-State plan was adopted 
rather than the three-State plan. Still more, the grief of the 
Wayne County people was of short duration. The political 
character of the population points to the conclusion that 
those interested in such questions were few in number ; and 
Burnet tells us that the project of a new Territory north of 
the Ordinance line, having Detroit as a capital, with the ac- 
companying offices, promised to the leaders of opinion, if they 
came out promptly and decidedly in favor of the new State 
on the plan proposed by Congress, effectually AVon these few 
over to the popular side.'' 

The flanks of those who opposed a new State, or favored 
bounding it on the west by the Scioto, had been completely 
turned. At first they talked about a further effort to post- 
pone the issue. A public meeting of citizens of Dayton and 
vicinity, held September 26th, unanimously passed a resolution 
denouncing the enabling act as a usurpation of power, bearing 
a "striking resemblance " to the course of Great Britain in re- 
gard to the colonies ; expressing deep sympathy with their 
fellow-citizens of Wayne County, and calling upon the Ter- 
ritorial Legislature to assert itself by causing a new census 
to be taken and by calling a convention to frame a constitu- 
tion. But these plans came to nothing. The members of 
the convention were duly elected, and on November i, 1802, 
they came together in Chillicothe, and organized for business. 
In his unfortunate address to the convention, Governor St. 
Clair stated, in very strong terms, the ordinary Federalist 
objections to the Enabling Act. He affirmed that no act of 
Congress was necessary to enable the Territory to form a State 
government, as the right was secured to them by the Ordi- 
nance ; declared that the people of Wayne County had been 

' Burnet : Notes, 494 et seq. ^ Notes, 337, 338. 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 313 

" bartered away like sheep in a market ; " and urged the forma- 
tion of a convention for the whole Territory and a demand for 
admission to the Union. " If we submit to the degradation 
[imposed by the Enabling Act] we should be trodden upon, 
and, what is worse, we should deserve to be trodden upon." ' 

The convention had first to decide whether it would itself 
form a constitution or call a second convention to do that 
work. This could hardly have been a doubtful question, no 
matter what the political antecedents of the members. The 
opposition totally collapsed, Judge Ephraim Cutler, of Mari- 
etta, being the only man who voted to refer the matter to a 
second convention. The convention proceeded with such ex- 
pedition that it adjourned, November 29th, having completed 
its task. 

Attention can here be drawn to only one feature of the 
constitution that the convention framed ; others will be men- 
tioned in future connections. 

And first, the Chillicothe convention planted the seed of 
controversies that affected the boundaries of three States. 
The fifth compact of 1787 ordained that there should be not 
less than three States, nor more than five, in the Territory be- 
yond the Ohio ; if three, the lines of division should be the 
meridian of the mouth of the Great Miami, and the Wabash 
and the meridian of Vincennes, from the Ohio River to the 
international line ; if four or five, then the lower States should 
be separated from the upper one or ones by the parallel pass- 
ing through the southern bend or extreme of Lake Michigan. 
North of this parallel the whole subject was left to the discre- 
tion of Congress. No legislation could be more binding than 
this east and west line; it was forever unalterable, except by 
common consent, and yet it was eventually set aside through- 
out its entire length from Lake Erie to the Mississippi River. 
The act of 1800 dividing the Territory seems to have assumed 
that the three-State plan would be followed ; but the Enabling 

' St. Clair Papers, II., 592 et seq. 



314 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Act for Ohio, of two years later, proceeded on the other theory. 
That act bounded the new State in the Northwest by the line 
of 1787, thus reaffirming the Ordinance. But the convention, 
and this is the seed planted at Chillicothe, inserted a proviso 
in the Constitution of Ohio that, in case the line should be 
found not to intersect Lake Erie, or to intersect it east of the 
mouth of the Maumee River, then, with the consent of Con- 
gress, the boundary should be a straight line running from 
the southerly extreme of the Lake to the most northerly cape 
of Maumee Bay, from its intersection with the Miami merid- 
ian to the international boundary-line. Judge Burnet says the 
understanding had always been that the Ordinance line would 
cross the strait connecting the two lakes between Detroit and 
the River Raisin ; but that, while the convention of 1802 was 
in progress, an old hunter, familiar with the region, appeared 
in Chillicothe, and imparted to some of the members the in- 
formation that the head of Lake Michigan was much farther 
south than had been supposed.' Whether this hunter's story 
was true or not, and whether it was the cause of the boundary- 
proviso, as Burnet states, it well illustrates the state of geo- 
graphical knowledge touching the Northwest at that time, 
and the sources of information upon which men conducting 
grave public business were sometimes compelled to draw. 
The act of 1803 recognizing Ohio said not a word about this 
proviso; but the act of 1805 creating the Territory of Michi- 
gan reaffirmed the Ordinance line. 

Ohio was never, in set terms, admitted to the Union ; but 
an act entitled " An Act to provide for the execution of the 
laws of the United States within the State of Ohio " was 
equivalent to the customary act of admission, and the date of 
its approval, February 19, 1803, is the proper date of admission.'' 

' Burnet : Notes, 360, 361. 

' The date of the admission of Ohio is the subject of much controversy, and 
has given rise to a considerable literature. As many as seven dates have been as- 
signed, but of these only three are worthy of mention : April 30, 1802, the date 
of the enabling act ; November 29, 1802, the date of the adjournment of the 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 315 

The act of 1802 assigned the thirty-five members of the 
convention to the counties as follows : Trumbull two, Jeffer- 
son five, Belmont two, Washington four, Ross five, Fairfield 
two, Adams three, Hamilton ten, and Clermont two. The 
counties bearing these names in 1802 were much larger than 
the counties bearing the same names to-day ; but as the 
names have remained with the original settlements, a glance 
at the map of 1887 will show where the people lived for whom 
the constitution was immediately made. Save only the two 
from Trumbull County, the thirty-five delegates all came from 
the Southern part of the State, and the large majority from a 
narrow strip of territory fringing the Ohio River. Excluding 
the small beginnings made on the Western Reserve, the Ohio 
of 1802 lay within the sweep of the Pennsylvania-Virginia 
current of emigration to the West. Of the twelve members 
of the convention whose previous history I have been able to 
trace, six came from Virginia, two from Massachusetts, and one 
each from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland, and Con- 
necticut. Still further, thirty-three of the forty-seven men 
who represented the State in Congress from 1803 to 1829 came : 
Nine from Pennsylvania, six each from Virginia, Connecticut, 
and New Jersey, three from New York, and one each from 
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Kentucky. The others 
are unknown. Judge Jacob Burnet, who rendered Ohio and 
the Northwest most valuable services as a member of the 
Territorial Council, as Judge of the Supreme Court, and as 
Senator, as well as author of the " Notes," was from New 
Jersey. These facts, in connection with those of a similar 
nature found in the last chapter, plainly indicate the origin of 
the forces that shaped the early destinies of Ohio. 



Chillicothe convention ; February 19, 1803, the date of the act of recognition 
mentioned above. Dr. I. W. Andrews has proved very conclusively that this 
last is the proper date. See " Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio — their Admission into 
the Union," in Magazine of American History for October, 1887. Still, the act 
of February 19, 1803, after recapitulating the history, says : "Whereby the said 
State has become one of the United States of America." 



3l6 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

II. Indiana. 

Population grew slowly, until, at the end of 1 815, it counted 
63,897 free white persons. When statehood became the ab- 
sorbing political question, the slavery issue lurked behind it. 
From the first there had been in the Territory a strong party 
determined to fix upon it some form of human slavery; but, 
fortunately, as time went on this party lost rather than gained 
ground. The petition that the legislature presented to Con- 
gress in 1 81 5 asking for admission to the Union, declared 
their attachment to the fundamental principles of legislation 
prescribed by Congress in the Ordinance of 1787, particularly 
as respects personal freedom and involuntary servitude, and 
expressed the hope that these principles might be continued 
as the basis of the constitution. The Enabling Act, approved 
April 19, 1 8 16, authorized the election of a convention that 
should either frame a constitution itself or provide for a sec- 
ond convention for that purpose. Submission to the people 
of the constitution to be framed was not required, but the 
act provided that it should be republican and not repugnant 
to the compacts of the Ordinance. The convention elected 
in pursuance of this act, framed at Corydon, June 10-29, the 
first constitution of Indiana. The pro-slavery delegates, not 
deterred by their previous defeats, strove to secure recogni- 
tion for slavery; but only to be defeated again. The boun- 
daries fixed by the Enabling Act were those of 1787, except 
that on the north, throughout the whole breadth of the State, 
the limit was carried ten miles beyond the line passing through 
the southern extreme of Lake Michigan. This was done in 
order to give the State a lake frontage. Indiana was admitted 
to the Union December 11, 1816. 

III. Illinois. 

The Enabling Act for Illinois, which bears the date, April 
18, 181 8, bounded the State on the east by the Indiana line 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 31/ 

as fixed two years before, on the south and west by the Ohio 
and Mississippi Rivers, and on the north by the parallel 42° 
30' north latitude. This last was a much more serious infrac- 
tion of the Ordinance than the Indiana line, and it deserves 
more than a passing allusion. 

The Enabling Act, as originally introduced into the House of 
Representatives by Mr. Pope, the Territorial delegate, adhered 
strictly to the Ordinance line ; but that statesman, thinking 
better of the matter, moved, April 3d, the line of 42° 30' as an 
amendment. He urged that the State, lying between the 
Mississippi Valley and the Lake Basin, and resting upon both, 
should be brought into relation with the States east by way 
of the lakes as well as the States south by way of the river ; 
said if the mouth of the Chicago River were included within 
her limits, the State would be interested in a canal connecting 
the two systems of waters and in improving the harbor on the 
lake ; insisted upon the State's right to a lake-frontage ; and 
also used an argument that, from 1789 to 1861, was made to 
do duty in almost every kind of political emergency. If shut 
out from the Northern waters, then, in case of national dis- 
ruption, the interests of the State would be to join a Southern 
and Western Confederacy ; but if a large portion of it could 
be made dependent upon the commerce and navigation of the 
Northern Lakes, connected as they were with the Eastern 
States, a rival interest would be created to check the wish for 
a Western or Southern confederacy ; and her interests would 
then be balanced, and her inclinations turned to the North. 
This reasoning was convincing to the South and the North 
alike, apparently, for the House adopted the amendment 
without a division. The consent of the people of Wisconsin 
was not asked, or the preference of those living in the district 
consulted. As the line of 1787 is in latitude 41° 37^ 07.9'' 
north, the tract of territory that Congress thus generously 
gave to Illinois, at the expense of Wisconsin, and in utter 
disregard of the Ordinance, is 52' 52.1'' of latitude, or a little 
more than sixty-one miles, in width, and in length, from the 



3l8 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

lake to the river; it contains 8,500 square miles of as good 
soil as exists in the Northwest, as well as many fine streams 
and the sites of such cities as Chicago, Rockford, Freeport, 
Galena, and Dixon, not to mention smaller ones. 

The Illinois State Convention sat at Kaskaskia, complet- 
ing its work, August 26, 18 18. The resolution of Congress 
declaring the admission of the State to the Union bears the 
date, December 3d, of the same year. A severe struggle on 
the practical recognition of slavery will be noticed in a future 
chapter. The population, which was mostly found in the 
Southern part of the State, was less than that required by the 
Ordinance. The census of 18 10 assigns 12,282, the census of 
1820, 55,162, people to Illinois. 

IV. Michigan. 

We come again to Michigan, the first part of the North- 
west visited by civilized men, and the last, except Wisconsin, 
to receive a permanent form of government. No other part 
of the United States has seen so many changes of national 
and local jurisdiction. It has belonged to France, to Eng- 
land, and to the United States; from 1796 to 1803 it was 
part of the Northwest Territory, from 1803 to 1805 a part of 
Indiana, and then an independent Territory until its admis- 
sion to the Union in 1837. Judge Cooley has appropriately 
sketched its history as a " history of governments " ' No 
other name of an organized Territory east of the Rocky 
Mountains has stood so long upon the map. Moreover, the 
growth of population was for a long time exceedingly slow. 
In explaining this fact. Judge Cooley mentions the late day 
at which the Indian titles to the soil were eased, the fur- 
trade within the Territory, the false ideas of Michigan geo- 
graphy, and the want of roads ; but, plainly, these are only 
proximate causes, and merely another way of saying that civ- 

> Preface to Michigan, in Commonwealth Series. 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 319 

ilization was slow in taking possession of the beautiful penin- 
sula. 

Some of the main causes of the early discovery and ex- 
ploration of the regions of the Upper Lakes also contributed 
to their late development. What were the opportunities of 
the French, and what use they made of them, has been shown 
in earlier chapters. Beyond discovery, exploration, and a 
feeble colonial life that was eventually extinguished, they 
did nothing for the Northwest. Had the St. Lawrence fallen 
to England that country would not have been so promptly 
explored, but it would have been more promptly peopled. 
It is easy to conceive a contingency in which the shores of 
the Lakes would have become the seats of civilization much 
earlier than the banks of the Ohio. As things turned, how- 
ever, Michigan drew her emigrants by the northern channel 
of emigration, from the Northern part of the Atlantic Plain. 
But here she was at a great disadvantage as compared with 
Ohio, particularly the Southern part. Emigration moved less 
promptly by this channel than by those farther south, and 
when it did move it was for many years absorbed by West- 
ern New York and Northern Ohio. It was not until the ap- 
pearance of steam-boats on the Lakes, in 1818, the opening 
of the Erie Canal in 1825, and the partial filling up of the 
inviting fields of emigration farther to the east, that the 
period of active settlement in Michigan began. While the 
population of Michigan merely doubled from 1800 to 1820, 
the population of Ohio increased twelve-fold. 

But political development was slow from another cause. 
It was many years before the inertia given to the community 
by the habitants could be overcome. Mr. Sibley wrote to 
Judge Burnet in 1802: "Nothing frightens the Canadians 
like taxes. They would prefer to be treated like dogs, and 
kenneled under the whip of a tyrant, than contribute to the 
support of a free government." In 1818, under the belief 
that the Territory had the requisite population, the question 
of entering on the second stage of government provided for 



320 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

by the Ordinance was submitted to the people, but was lost 
by a decided majority, and it was not until 1827 that that end 
was fully consummated. Plainly, the old regime had done 
its work as thoroughly as Colbert could have desired. 

But in time steps forward began to be taken. In 1832 
the people, at a popular election, cast a large majority vote 
in favor of entering into a State government. In 1834 a cen- 
sus showed that between the two lakes and north of the line 
of 1787 there was a population of 87,278. Proceeding upon 
the theory held by St. Clair and other Federalists in 1802, 
that no Enabling Act was needed, the Territorial Legislature, 
January 26, 1835, passed an act calling a convention to 
frame a State constitution, and appointing April 4th the day 
for the election of delegates. This election was duly held ; 
the convention sat in Detroit, May nth to June 29th; the 
people ratified the constitution framed, at an election held 
November 2d ; President Jackson laid it before Congress in a 
special message, December 9th, and the State would, no doubt, 
have been promptly admitted had it not encountered a series 
of adverse influences that render " the Michigan case " one of 
the most remarkable in the history of the admission of new 
States. The first and most formidable of these was a boun- 
dary-quarrel with Ohio. 

The constitution for Michigan framicd at Detroit assumed 
in its preamble the boundaries of the Territory as established 
in 1805, viz. : The Ordinance line on the south ; a line drawn 
through the middle of Lake Michigan to its northerly extrem- 
ity, and a line due north from that point on the west ; and the 
international boundary on the north and east. This was 
overlapping Indiana as bounded in 18 16, and the provisional 
boundary of Ohio adopted in 1802. The Indiana and Illinois 
boundaries did not touch the Ohio-Michigan controversy that 
we are now to sketch, save as they tended to destroy the au- 
thority of the Ordinance. 

Between 1802 and 1835 some history was made on the 
Northwestern Ohio frontier. In 1817 a Government surveyor 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 321 

laid down the boundary in conformity with the Chillicothe 
idea, and a little later another ran the line in conformity with 
the Michigan idea. These lines are called the " Harris " and 
"Fulton" lines, from the names of the two surveyors. In 
18 12 Amos Spafford, collector of the port of Miami, wrote 
to Governor Meigs, saying the fifty families comprising that 
settlement desired to have the laws of Ohio extended over 
them ; that the few who objected were office-holders under 
the Governor of Michigan, who were determined to enforce 
the Michigan laws ; that the people regarded this a great usur- 
pation, and that he anticipated serious trouble unless the 
matter was adjusted. In 1823 Dr. Horatio Conant, of 
Fort Meigs, wrote to Ethan Allen Brown, Senator from Ohio, 
that the Michigan jurisdiction was extended to the territory 
between the Harris and Fulton lines, with the decided appro- 
bation of the inhabitants, which " makes it impossible for the 
State officers of Ohio to interfere without exciting disturb- 
ance." ' The territory was in possession of Michigan all this 
time ; it had been organized into a township, and roads had 
been cut at her expense. The letters of Spafford and Conant 
show that the people sometimes inclined to one side and some- 
times to the other; which was not unnatural, considering that 
they were settlers in a wihderness who had formed no jurisdic- 
tional attachments, and that sometimes their interests seemed 
to incline them to Columbus, and then again to Detroit. But 
now there came a change. The city of Toledo was founded 
in 1832; and the inhabitants desired to belong to Ohio and not 
to Michigan. Especially were they anxious to secure the full 
advantage of the Miami Canal, then in course of construction 
from Cincinnati to the mouth of the Maumee. The strip 
of disputed land extended from Indiana to Lake Erie, eight 
miles wide at one end and five at the other, containing four 
hundred and sixty-eight square miles. The land was rich and 

' The two letters are found in Knapp's History of tlie Maumee Valley, 242, 

243- 

21 



122 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

fertile, but the prizes in the contest that opened in 1835 were 
the mouth of the Maumee and the young but promising 
city of Toledo. Evidently, the Ordinance line did not well 
suit territorial relations. It excluded Indiana and Illinois 
from Lake Michigan, and cut the people of the Maumee off 
from their natural connections. To be sure, these business 
arguments have no weight to the mind of a jurist in 1898; but 
they had great weight with the forceful people of the North- 
west in 1816, 1818, and 1835. They would naturally demand : 
"Why should a line established in ignorance of geography 
and in advance of territorial development be suffered to stand 
in the way of our convenience ? " 

In 1835 Governor Lucas brought the boundary-question 
before the Ohio Legislature. That body promptly extended 
the contiguous Ohio counties over the disputed tract, and 
directed the Governor to appoint three commissioners to sur- 
vey and re-mark the Harris line. At the end of March, Gov- 
ernor Lucas, attended by his staff and the boundary commis- 
sioners, arrived at Perrysburg to carry out the directions of 
the Legislature. As resistance was expected, General Bell 
and some six hundred Ohio militia were called into the field. 
These went into camp at the same place. Governor Mason 
of Michigan, attended by General Brown at the head of 
about one thousand Michigan militia, took possession of 
Toledo. At this juncture Richard Rush, of Philadelphia, and 
B. C. Howard, of Baltimore, arrived in the tented valley of 
the Maumee, sent by President Jackson as rnessengers of 
peace. Their efforts to effect a compromise until Congress 
could settle the dispute accomplished nothing more than the 
disbanding of the militia. What is variously known as " Gov- 
ernor Lucas's War," the " Toledo War," etc., came to a sud- 
den end. It was a bloodless war ; it had some serious and 
many comic aspects, and long furnished material for merri- 
ment in both Ohio and Michigan. The further local inci- 
dents of the controversy, such as the attempt of Ohio to run 
the Harris line and the seizure of some of the surveying 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. ^2^ 

party by Michigan officers ; the special session of the Ohio 
Legislature, at which it enacted a law to prevent the forcible 
abduction of the citizens of Ohio, created Lucas County, ex- 
tending to the Harris line, appropriated $300,000 out of 
the treasury to carry into effect the laws in relation to the 
northern boundary, and authorized the Governor to borrow as 
much more on the credit of the State ; the arrest and impris- 
onment by Michigan officers of citizens of Ohio ; the excite- 
ment in both the State and the Territory ; the disturbed 
state of affairs at Toledo — these and other incidents of local 
interest must be passed by. The quarrel was settled by poli- 
ticians at Washington, and not by militia generals and sheriffs 
on the banks of the Maumee. 

Strictly speaking, the quarrel was between Ohio and the 
United States. The Attorney-General gave President Jack- 
son an opinion that, until Congress should change the law, 
the land between the Harris and Fulton lines belonged to 
Michigan ; and this opinion was properly binding on the 
President as long as Mr. Butler continued his law adviser. 
But the President was in a strait. A presidential election 
would occur the next year, and he was deeply interested in 
the candidacy of Martin Van Buren. Indiana and Illinois, 
both of which States had profited by the disregard of the line 
of 1787, sympathized with Ohio; and the three States together 
had a large number of votes to be given to either the Demo- 
cratic or the Whig candidate. Michigan stood alone, only a 
Territory. John Quincy Adams thus defined the situation : 
" Never in the course of my life have I known a controversy 
of which all the right was so clearly on one side and all the 
power so overwhelmingly on the other; never a case where 
the temptation was so intense to take the strongest side and 
the duty of taking the weakest was so thankless." ' Very 
naturally, ■ the President counselled both sides to keep the 
peace, but he was understood to lean to the Ohio side. 

' Cooley : Michigan, 219. 



324 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

But this was not all the politics involved in the case. The 
State of Arkansas also stood at the door of the Union knock- 
ing for admission. The administration party was anxious 
that both the States be admitted in time to vote at the en- 
suing presidential election, for it was expected that both 
would be Democratic ; but Michigan was a free State, Arkan- 
sas a slave State, and although it was understood that, in this 
scale, one would balance the other, there was yet an anxiety 
on either side lest the other should get the advantage. 

Besides, a State government had been organized. A 
member of the House of Representatives, as well as legisla- 
tive and executive ofifiicers, had been elected, and judges had 
been appointed. The legislature had met and chosen the 
national Senators. President Jackson, displeased at the ac- 
tivity of Governor Mason on the boundary-controversy, ap- 
pointed a new Territorial governor to succeed him, whom the 
people would not receive, and whom they soon joked and 
laughed across Lake Michigan into Wisconsin, which was still 
a part of Michigan Territory. This was the local situation : 
Theoretically, the Territorial government was in force, but 
practically, the State government. Obviously, such a state 
of things could not long continue in an Anglo-Saxon coun- 
try. 

Acts for the admission of the two States were finally ap- 
proved, June 15, 1836. The- one admitted Arkansas uncon- 
ditionally, the other Michigan with a very serious condition, 
that is hinted by the very title of the law : " An Act to es- 
tablish the northern boundary line of the State of Ohio, and 
to provide for the admission of the State of Michigan into 
the Union," etc. ^ Section i gave the district in dispute to 
Ohio ; but Section 2 made Michigan a territorial compensa- 
tion in the Upper Peninsula, drawing the line separating her 
from Wisconsin through Green Bay, the Menomonee River, 
Lake of the Desert, and Montreal River. These arrange- 
ments Michigan was required to assent to by a delegate con- 
vention elected for that sole purpose, before she could take 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 325 

her place in the family of States. A convention that sat at 
Ann x\rbor on the fourth Monday of September rejected this 
overture by a very decided majority, and for a time it seemed 
that nothing had been concluded. 

But now the politicians came again upon the scene. Ar- 
guments in favor of the State's yielding were put in circu- 
lation. Political arithmeticians at Washington figured out 
how much the five per cent, on the public lands sold within 
the State would yield, affirming that it would all be lost. 
The Senators and Representatives were desirous of taking 
their seats in Congress. President Jackson and his partisans 
exerted a steady pressure on the same side. The edge of dis- 
appointment becoming somewhat dulled, the people of the 
State, with characteristic American good humor, began to 
look on the bright side, and before the end of October Demo- 
cratic county conventions were calling for a second State con- 
vention to pass upon the terms of admission. The State 
Governor replied that there was no time to call a second 
convention, and that he had no authority to call one, but 
hinted that the Government at Washington might, possibly, 
recognize a popular convention. Accordingly, five citizens, 
" in the name of the people in their primary capacity," called 
a convention to meet in Ann Arbor, December 14th. This 
was in pursuance of a scheme worked out in the Democratic 
caucuses. Although the elections of delegates were much 
ridiculed, they were still held, and although the convention 
was stigmatized as the " frost-bitten convention," it still sat, 
and did the work for which it had been called — that is, " as- 
sented " to the terms of the act of admission, having no more 
authority to do so than the crew of a Detroit schooner or a 
lumberman's camp in the Valley of Grand River. Still fur- 
ther, and most astounding of all, the two Houses of Congress, 
by large majorities, passed an act, approved January 26, 1837, 
accepting this convention as meeting the requirements of the 
act of admission, and so declared Michigan one of the Unit- 
ed States. The electoral vote, however, was not counted. 



326 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Judge Campbell says the State was recognized when admitted 
as having existed since November, 1835.' As one closes the 
history of the admission of Michigan, he wonders whether 
the people learned to accent the first word in the Territorial 
motto : Tandem fit siirciihis arbor. 

The Upper Peninsula is about three hundred miles in 
length, and from thirty to one hundred and sixty in breadth. 
It contains about twenty-two thousand six hundred square 
miles of area. It has considerable agricultural resources ; its 
copper and iron mines are among the richest in the world ; its 
fisheries are the finest on the Lakes; it contains excellent har- 
bors, and it commands the outlets of both Lake Michigan 
and Lake Superior ; and yet Michigan was unwilling to ac- 
cept this rich peninsula for a few hundred square miles of 
corn-lands on the Ohio border. She protested again and 
again that she did not wish to extend beyond the boundaries 
assigned her in 1805. The tip of the Northern Peninsula she 
strove for when Wisconsin sought to wrest it from her, be- 
cause of its relations to the two straits, and because of the an- 
cient commercial connection between Detroit and the upper 
posts ; but she wished nothing more. Mr. Lyon, the Territorial 
delegate, said, in 1834, "that for a great part of the year nat- 
ure had separated the Upper and Lower peninsulas by im- 
passable barriers, and that there never could be any identity of 
interest or community of feeling between them." However, 
when we remember that the copper mines first became pro- 
ductive in historic times in 1845, although they had been 
worked by the Mound Builders, and been known to white 
men since the days of Brule and Joliet, and that the whole 
Upper Peninsula in 1837 seemed a sterile waste, we need not 
be surprised at Michigan's preference for the mouth of the 
Maumee. 

1 Political History of Michigan, 478. 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. Z^J 

V. Wisconsin. 

The Ordinance of 1787 left to the discretion of Congress 
the question whether the Northwest should be divided into 
three, four, or five States. No man, looking at the map, can 
doubt that the five-State plan was far better than either of 
the others. States extending from the Ohio River to the 
national boundary would have been of over-size, as well as 
ill-shapen ; while Michigan and Wisconsin are both too large 
and too widely separated to constitute one State. These 
facts were perceived as early as 1802 and 1805. Furthermore, 
it was perceived at the same time that the Upper Peninsula 
belongs geographically to Wisconsin. Accordingly, in 1805 
the dividing line between them was drawn from the southern 
bend of Lake Michigan through the middle of that lake to its 
extremity, that is, the Straits of Mackinaw, where historical 
causes turned it due north on the INIiami meridian to the 
national limit. The addition of Wisconsin to Michigan for 
purposes of government, in 181 8, subject to the future dispo- 
sition of Congress, confirmed this line. Nor was any other 
thought entertained until a territorial compensation to Michi- 
gan for the lands that the course of events required her to 
surrender to Ohio was proposed. The plan of giving her the 
Upper Peninsula appears to have been first suggested by Mr. 
Preston, of South Carolina, when the Ohio-Michigan boun- 
dary was before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. He 
thought the region beyond the Lake too large for one State, 
and he appears to have thought the peninsula an island. Mr. 
Preston said in the Senate : " Whatever disadvantage may 
arise from connecting with Michigan a portion of the country 
west or north of the Lake is, we think, not to be weighed 
with the inconvenience of subjecting, forever after, to the 
jurisdiction of a single State all the inhabitants who may re- 
side in the region west and north of the Lake." ' 

' In preparing this account of the controversy touching the Wisconsin boun- 
daries, the author acknowledges his indebtedness to two articles entitled The 



328 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Wisconsin, more unwilling to part with the peninsula 
than Michigan was to receive it, made a valiant effort for its 
retention. The connection of the two regions under the law 
of 1818 proved little more than nominal, and the people be- 
yond the Lake made repeated efforts, beginning as early as 
1829, to secure the organization of an independent territory, 
called, at different times, " Chippewau," " Wiskonsan," and 
" Huron," that should include the whole peninsula to the 
very tip. The act of April 20, 1836, creating the Territory, 
bounded it on the northeast by the line of the Michigan En- 
abling Act. A survey of that line made in 1840 and 1841 dis- 
closed the fact that Congress had assumed a state of things that 
did not exist, and that the line was an impossible one. Wis- 
consin took advantage of this discovery to bring forward her 
original claim, pleading the Ordinance of 1787, which did not 
touch the issue (since in the northern tier of States everything 
was left to the discretion of Congress), and the acts of 1805 
and 1818, which was more to the purpose; but she expressed 
a willingness to accept a "compensation " in the shape of ex- 
tensive and valuable internal improvements. The legislative 
committee that uttered these views recommended that the 
Territory insist upon her " ancient boundaries," to the extent, 
if necessary, of forming a " State out of the Union,'' " the sov- 
ereign^ i}idependent State of Wisconsin^'' and then of appealing 
to the Supreme Arbiter of Nations to adjust all difficulties that 
might arise. A most belligerent address to Congress, adopted 
about the same time, declared that Wisconsin would never 
" lose sight of the principle that, whatever may be the sacri- 
fice, the integrity of her boundaries must be observed." ' It 
is needless, perhaps, to say that this is the familiar voice of 
South Carolina in the days before the Civil War. But this 
note of secession, sounded among the woods and lakes of the 



Boundaries of Wisconsin, by R. G. Thwaites, in Magazine of Western History, 
Sept. and Oct. 1887. See also, Wis. Hist. Coll., Vol. XL, 451. 
1 Magazine of Western History, VI., 504, 529. 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 329 

Northwest, made no impression on the course of events. 
Having compelled Michigan to accept what she did not want, 
Congress now compelled Wisconsin to surrender what she 
wished to retain. The Enabling Act approved August 6, 1846, 
followed the Menomonee-Montreal line with some slight modi- 
fications.' In both the conventions held under it, attempts 
were made to win back the ancient northeastern boundary, 
but without success. 

The act of 1836, creating the Territory of Wisconsin, made 
the line 42° 30' the southern boundary. Three years later, 
and twenty-one years after the admission of the State of Illi- 
nois, the Territorial Legislature adopted resolutions declaring 
that Congress had violated the Ordinance of 1787 in fixing 
the northern boundary of Illinois, and requesting the people 
of the Territory, and also those living between the line of 
1787 and parallel 42° 30', to vote at the next general election 
upon the question of forming a State government that should 
embrace the whole of ancient Wisconsin. Strange to say, this 
proposition was received with more favor by the people of 
Northern Illinois than by the people of Wisconsin proper. 
Public meetings held in various Illinois towns adopted reso- 
lutions in favor of the Wisconsin claim ; and a convention 
held at Rockford, July 6, 1840, declared that the fourteen 
northern counties of Illinois belonged to Wisconsin, and rec- 
ommended the people to elect delegates' to a convention to 
be held at Madison in November, for the purpose of adopt- 
ing such lawful and constitutional measures as may seem to 
be necessary and proper for the early adjustment of the south- 
ern boundary.* Public sentiment ran very strong in many 
of these counties in favor of the Wisconsin claim. But the 
boundary was complicated with the formation of a State 
government, which the people at the north thought prema- 



1 Mr. Thwaites contends that the seeds of future controversies lie thick along 
this line. 

2 Magazine of Western History, VI., 53S, 539. 



S30 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

turc, and the total vote cast in favor of the proposition of 
1839 was small. In 1842 the Territorial Governor sent an 
official communication to the Governor of Illinois, informing 
him that the Illinois jurisdiction over the frontier counties 
was " accidental and temporary." The Enabling Act of 1S46 
followed the Illinois line on the south, as it followed the 
Michigan line on the northeast, and again Wisconsin sub- 
mitted. In the first constitutional convention a vigorous but 
unsuccessful attempt was made to secure a clause referring all 
disputes as to boundary to the Supreme Court of the United 
States, the State to come in with boundaries undetermined. 
Here, again, politics intervened ; the failure of this plan is said 
to have been due, in part, to the jealousy of the Northern Il- 
linois politicians entertained by those of Wisconsin. Nor is 
it unlikely that political ambition had something to do with 
the fondness of the Illinois counties for a northern State con- 
nection. 

As Wisconsin was the last of the five Northwestern States 
to enter the Union, it was not, perhaps, surprising that her 
geographical and historical boundaries should be invaded on 
the south and northeast ; but it would appear surprising that 
on the farther or northwestern side, she should have suffered 
more heavily than on any other side. The explanation con- 
sists of facts of geography and of history. 

After the rectification of the northwestern boundary by 
the treaty of 1818, the meridian of the north westernmost 
point of the Lake of the Woods, from its intersection with 
the Mississippi to parallel 49°, was considered the farther 
boundary of the Northwest Territory; but the act of 1838, 
creating the Territory of Iowa, drew a line due north from 
the head-waters or sources of the Mississippi to that parallel, 
and this line Wisconsin henceforth called her "ancient boun- 
dary " in that quarter. The second of these lines falls some- 
what farther to the west than the first one. Again, the 
population that planted the early settlements on the upper 
waters of the Mississippi reached their destination by ascend- 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 33 1 

ing the river, and not by an overland journey from Lake 
Michigan ; moreover, all their natural connections, industrial, 
commercial, political, and social, were with the river valley 
rather than with the lake basin. In these circumstances orig- 
inated the idea of a " sixth State," to consist either wholly of 
territory belonging to the old Northwest, or partly of such 
territory and partly of territory acquired of France in 1803. 

The Enabling Act for Wisconsin, approved August 6, 1846, 
departed from the " ancient boundary," adopting the follow- 
ing in its stead : The main channel of the St. Louis River to 
the first rapids in the same (above the Indian village, accord- 
ing to Nicollet's map) ; thence due south to the main branch 
of the River St. Croix; thence down the main channel of 
said river to the Mississippi. In the debate the extension of 
*'the ancient boundary " beyond the limits of the original 
Territory, the great size of Wisconsin unless limited, and the 
desirability of a State that should lie on both sides of the 
great river and encompass its farther sources, were urged in 
favor of this line. In the constitutional convention which sat 
at Madison, October 5th, this boundary received far more at- 
tention than any other. The people of the St. Croix Valley, 
who were left in Wisconsin, wished to go with their neighbors 
across the river. At the end of a long contest, by a vote of 
49 ayes to 38 nays, the convention adopted a proviso that 
would have thrown the basin of the St. Croix into the State 
beyond. The principal champion of this measure favored a 
State extending from the Mississippi to the Saut Ste. Marie 
and Green Bay, to be called " Superior," On March 3, 1847, 
Congress assented to this proviso, but a month later the peo- 
ple, at a popular election, rejected the constitution on grounds 
wholly distinct from boundaries. 

In the second constitutional convention, convened at 
Madison, December 15, 1847, this ground was all fought over 
again with equal pertinacity. The Lake Michigan side of the 
State now proved to be stronger than the Mississippi side; 
and the convention adopted a proviso that the boundary 



332 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

should be drawn from the rapids of the St. Louis southward 
to the mouth of the Rum River, which is some twenty miles 
above the Falls of St. Anthony, thus giving a large tract that 
now belongs to Minnesota, including St. Paul and the eastern 
side of Minneapolis, to Wisconsin. This proviso brought out 
the full strength of the Upper Mississippi settlements in oppo- 
sition. The people of the St. Croix Valley and about Fort 
Snelling sent a strong memorial to Washington, urging, among 
other things, that " the Chippeway and St. Croix valleys 
are closely connected in geographical position with the up- 
per Mississippi, while they are widely separated from the 
settled posts of Wisconsin, not only by hundreds of miles of 
mostly waste and barren lands, which must remain unculti- 
vated for ages, but equally so by a diversity of interests and 
character in the population." ' This memorial suggested a 
line drawn due south from Cheqaumegon Bay, on Lake Su- 
perior, to the main Chippeway River, and thence down that 
stream to the Mississippi. This memorial, seconded by a 
vigorous lobby, defeated the Rum River proviso, but did not 
secure the Chippeway line. Wisconsin came into the Union 
with the limits of the Enabling Act. No man who studies the 
geography of the Upper Mississippi, and its material and polit- 
ical interests, will question the practical wisdom of the limita- 
tion on the western side, whatever he may think of its legal- 
ity. He will also be apt to think, with the memorialists of 
1848, that the Chippeway would have been abetter boundary 
than the St. Croix. 

In all, Wisconsin lost about fifty-seven thousand square 
miles of territority originally intended for her,^ but she remains 
the third of the Northwestern States in size, falling only 
1,490 square miles behind Illinois, and 2,527 square miles be- 
hind Michigan.' 

After a very animated contest, the first Wisconsin consti- 



' Magazine of Western History. 

^ Viz., 8,5CX) to Illinois, 22,600 to Michigan, and 26,000 to Minnesota. 



ADMISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN STATES. 333 

tution was rejected by a majority of 6,112 votes in a total of 
34,450. The people of the Territory, in common with the peo- 
ple of the West generally, had suffered many evils from reck- 
less and irresponsible banking. These evils, together with the 
extreme Democratic opinions relating to banks and paper 
money, led the convention to deny all legal authority to 
banks. The constitution declared it not lawful for any corpo- 
ration, institution, person or persons within the State, to make 
or issue paper money, or any evidence of debt intended to 
circulate as money ; forbade any corporation to carry on any 
of the other functions of banking institutions; prohibited the 
establishment of any branch or agency of a banking institu- 
tion existing without the State ; and made it illegal to circu- 
late, after 1849, bank-notes of a less denomination than $20. 
Deposit, discount, and exchange banking were left wholly to 
private enterprise. The convention had presumed too far 
upon the popular hostility to banks. The Whigs opposed the 
constitution to a man, and many of the Democrats as well- 
Serious objections were also made to other features that will 
not be particularized. The second convention followed, for 
the most part, the paths marked out by its predecessor. But 
it empowered the legislature to submit to the voters, at any 
general election, the question of " bank or no bank ; " also to 
grant bank charters, or to pass a general banking law, pro- 
vided a majority of all the votes cast on this subject should 
be in favor of banks. This constitution was ratified by a 
majority of over 10,000 in a vote of 23,000. Wisconsin was 
admitted to the Union May 29, 1848. The State received 
its emigration by the great northern current, and accordingly 
had to wait until Michigan was partially peopled, as Michigan 
had been obliged to wait for Western New York and Northern 
Ohio. The population was only 30,945 in 1840, but it made 
the astonishing advance to 305,391 in the ten years following. 

Minnesota, the half-sister of the five Northwestern States, 
was admitted to the Union May 11, 1858. 

The five noble commonwealths formed out of the Terri- 



334 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tory Northwest of the River Ohio, with their thirteen and a 
half milHons of population ; their material, intellectual, and 
moral resources ; their vast wealth of achievements and still 
vaster wealth of possibilities, are the grandest testimonial to 
the Ordinance of 1787, to the men who framed it, and to the 
pioneers who laid their foundations.^ 



^ Important information relating to tlie boundaries of Ohio and the neighbor- 
ing States, and particularly Michigan, will be found in the following sources : 
Report of the Joint Commission Appointed by the States of Pennsylvania and 
Ohio to Ascertain and Re-mark the Boundary Line between Said States, as it 
was Originally Established. Columbus, 1883 ; Ohio Archaeological and Histori- 
cal Publications. Vol. IV., pp. 67, 127, 199 ; Annah May Soule, The Southern 
and Western Boundaries of Michigan, Publications of the Michigan Political 
Science Association, Vol. II., No. 2. R. G. Thwaites, The Boundaries of Wis- 
consin, Wisconsin Historical Collections, Vol. XL, considers fully the boundary 
controversies in which Wisconsin has been involved. 

A large amount of documentary material relating to Northwestern titles, and 
especially Ohio titles, will be found in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical 
Publications, Vol. V., From Charter to Constitution, compiled by D. J. Ryan. 
The Journal of the Chillicothe Convention, with related documents, is found in 
this compilation. For the historical division of Ohio, see History and Govern- 
ment of Ohio, B. A. and M. L. Hmsdale, Chicago and N. Y., chap. vii. 



XVIII. 
SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 

The surprise that historians still continue to express at 
the ease and celerity with which the Ordinance of 1787 was 
enacted culminates when they come to the sixth article of 
compact. A few words touching that article will serve as a 
fitting introduction to an account of slavery in the Territory 
Northwest of the River Ohio. 

At the close of the Revolutionary War slavery existed in 
nearly all the States of the Union, but was far stronger in the 
South than in the North. In the one section the causes were 
already at work that ere long brought about its abolishment ; 
in the other, the causes had not yet begun to operate that, in 
the end, practically united all the people in defence of slavery. 
In the sense of later controversies, the one section was not 
anti-slavery nor the other pro-slavery. The Northern States 
tended toward anti-slavery views, but not in the aggressive 
spirit of later times ; the Southern States, toward pro-slavery 
views, but not with such unanimity as to preclude a great 
amount of strong and even fervid anti-slavery sentiment, and 
particularly in Virginia. The better opinion South and North 
was that slavery could not be violentl}' uprooted; that it 
must be tolerated and protected for the time ; but that it 
was an evil the peaceful death of which every real well-wisher 
of his country would be glad to hasten. This was the opinion 
that declared itself in the slavery compromises of the Con- 
stitution, and in the sixth article of compact of the Ordinance 
of the same year, which is also a compromise, as anyone must 
see the moment he looks at the two clauses of the article bal- 



336 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

anced on the word " provided." The long and fierce contest 
over the extension of slavery, which did not begin until many 
years afterward, gave to that prohibition an importance which 
no one dreamed of according to it at the time of its enact- 
ment. The fact is, the article was not of the substance of the 
Ordinance. It was not even apart of the original draft, but 
was brought forward by Mr. Dane on the second reading. 
There is no reason to suppose that Mr. Lee, of Virginia, 
changed his views on the subject of slavery in the interval, but 
he voted against the prohibition of 1 784, and for the prohibition 
of 1787. The Ohio Associates desired the exclusion of slavery 
from the region where they proposed to purchase lands, and 
probably would have declined to purchase them without it ; ' 

' This was a point that the New England men always insisted upon. The 
" Propositionsforsettling a new State by such officers and soldiers of the Federal 
Army as should associate for that purpose," drawn up by Colonel Timothy 
Pickering, early in 1783, which was an important link in the history of the Ohio 
Company, when told at length, contained this language : " The total exclusion of 
slavery from the State to form an essential and irrevocable part of the constitu- 
tion." The editors of the "Life of Rev. Manasseh Cutler" present convincing 
evidence that Dr. Cutler was the author of the sections of the Ordinance of 1787 
relating to religion, education, and slavery (L, 342-344). Judge Ephraim Cutler, 
mentioned in the text, says his father asked him, in 1804-1S05, whether he had 
prepared the prohibition of slavery inserted in the Ohio Constitution. On re- 
ceiving an afhrniative answer, the doctor said it was a singular coincidence, as he 
had himself prepared Article VL of the Ordinance, while he was in New York 
negotiating the Ohio purchase. The doctor further said he acted in that matter 
for associates, friends, and neighbors who would not embark in the enterprise 
unless the principles in relation to religion, education, and slavery were unalter- 
ably fixed. Dr. Cutler's editors also bring out with much force, as partially ex- 
plaining the singular interest that the Virginia members of Congress took in the 
Ohio purchase and the Ordinance, that settlements on the further banks of the 
Ohio would be a screen for the Virginia and Kentucky settlements on the south 
bank against the Indians. They say further: "Virginia, under the leadership 
of Washmgton, had entered upon a wise and comprehensive policy of internal 
improvement, designed to secure the trade of the Ohio Valley and the Northwest 
to Virginia seaports. Additional value would also be imparted to her bounty- 
lands lying between the Scioto and Little Miami. Add to these the personal 
sympathy of Washington for the success of his old associates, as well as his own 
landed interests in the Ohio Valley, and we find plain business considerations 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. ^2,7 

but their attitude toward its extension was very different 
from that of David Wilmot and Abraham Lincohi. Accord- 
ingly, the sixth compact was regarded neither as an anti- 
slavery victory nor as a pro-slavery defeat ; it was simply a 
feature, though an important one, of the frame of govern- 
ment provided for the Northwest. The tremendous conse- 
quences flowing from "it no man then living was w'xsq. enough 
to foretell. Still the article was of great immediate advantage 
to freedom ; for when the real battle with slavery in the North- 
west was joined, it proved a rocl^ of defence that was never 
successfully assaulted. 

Negro slaves were introduced into the Mississippi Valley 
early in the eighteenth century. Throughout the French 
period pecuniary ability and personal desire were the only 
limitations on the number of such slaves that a colonist might 
own. Accordingly, as the Jiabitaiits of the Northwest in- 
creased in substance and were brought into closer commercial 
relations with Louisiana and the West Indies, they imported 
them in considerable numbers. The number continued to 
grow, both by natural increase and by later importations. 
Judge Breese quotes a Jesuit missionary who found i,ioo 
whites, 300 blacks, and 60 " red slaves of the savages " in 
five Illinois villages in 1750.' But this slavery was of the old 
patriarchal rather than the modern commercial type. Breese 
gives a pleasing picture of the male slaves working side by 
side in the fields with their masters, and of the females going 
with their mistresses "in neat attire " to matins and vespers; 
both " unmindful of the fetters with which a wicked policy 
had bound them." ° Monctte gives an equally pleasing pict- 
ure of the festive enjoyments of the habitants, in which the 
slaves freely mingled.' An ordinance of Louis XV., issued in 

that controlled at that time this most important decision. And all evidence 
points to Rev. Manasseh Cutler as the agent wlio carefully, skilfully, and suc- 
cessfully conducted these negotiations and l)rought about their results" (I., 352). 

' Early History of Illinois, 194. '■'Ibid., 199, 2CX). 

^ History of the Valley of the Mississippi, I., i86, 187. 
22 



338 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

1724, enjoined that all slaves in the French colonies should 
" be educated in the Apostolic Roman Catholic religion, and 
be baptized," enjoining their owners to have these matters at- 
tended to within a reasonable time, under pain of an arbitrary 
fine, ' Negro slaves were relatively numerous in the North- 
west in 1763. Governor Reynolds, who says the first impor- 
tation was one of five hundred made from San Domingo in 
1726, by Philip Renault, to work the mines, reports that 
there were 168 slaves in Illinois in 18 10, 917 in 1820, and 746 
in i830.''' Negro slaves arg also heard of at Green Bay in 
Wisconsin/ 

The Western Indians wxre slave-holders. They followed 
the ancient and honorable custom of selling captives taken in 
war into slavery, often as the alternative of putting them to 
death ; and among their best customers, from the early days 
of French colonization, were the white men, who often 
bought, it must be added, as acts of humanity. So many of 
these red slaves belonged to a single tribe that Pawnee, or 
" Pani " as the French wrote it, came to be the common word 
for slave irrespective of race, thus repeating the history of the 
word " Slav " itself. 

The transfer of the Northwest to England in no way dis- 
turbed the relation of master and slave ; for the capitulation 
of 1760 and the treaty of 1763 guaranteed the full protection 
of all the property of the people who were transferred. 
Moreover, such Englishmen as made their way into the coun- 
try enjoyed the same privileges as the old residents, and 
some of them promptly improved this opportunity. As a 
consequence, the Northwest came to the United States with 
a slave dowery ; and although the treaty of 1783 did not 
repeat the guarantee of the treaty of 1763, no one thought 
that the dowery would in any way be interfered with, for slav- 
ery was then, practically, co-extensive with the Union. The 



' Dillon : History of Indiana, 32. ^ My Own Times, 28, 132. 

^Strong : Ilislory of the Territory of Wisconsin, 67. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 339 

Northwest was slave territory all through the Virginia period, 
reaching from 1778. to 1784; and when that State made her 
cession she stipulated, in terms: "That the French and Ca- 
nadian inhabitants and other settlers . . . who have 
professed themselves citizens of Virginia, shall have their 
possessions and titles confirmed to them, and be protected 
in the enjoyment of their rights and liberties ; " and this 
stipulation, no doubt, included slaves. Furthermore, the 
United States Government recognized the existence of slav- 
ery in the Territory. The Ordinance of 1784 mentions 
" free males of full age " and free inhabitants ; and, by al- 
lowing the people " to adopt the constitution and laws of 
any one of the original States," gave full scope for the con- 
tinuance of slavery. It has even been contended that the 
expression, " free male inhabitants," found in the great Or- 
dinance, assumes tacitly that such slavery as then existed 
in the Territory should not be disturbed. And, finally, Jay's 
Treaty, negotiated in 1794, in the article providing for the 
evacuation of the Western posts on June i, 1796, guaranteed 
to all settlers and traders within the precincts or jurisdiction 
of the said posts all their property of every kind and pro- 
tection therein, which applied to slaves as well as to other 
property. 

In his very entertaining account of life at Detroit in the 
years following the extension of the American authority 
over that town, Judge Burnet, after bearing testimony to the 
" excellence of their hirelings and domestics," adds : " But 
their best servants were the Pawnee Indians, and their de- 
scendants, who were held and disposed of as slaves, under the 
French and English governments — a species of slavery which 
existed to a considerable extent in Upper Canada. . . . 
That relation existed when the country was delivered up to 
the United States ; though the practice of purchasing Indian 
captives as slaves, by the white people, had ceased before the 
surrender; and consequently, the principal part, if not all, 
the Indians then in slavery were the descendants of enslaved 



340 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

captives."* Judge Cooley divides the slaves in the Northwest, 
in 1796, "as regards the legal questions affecting their lib- 
erty," into three classes: (i) "Those who were in servitude 
to French owners previous to the cession of jurisdiction to 
England, and who were still claimed as property in which the 
owners were protected under the treaty of cession," 1763. (2) 
" Those who were held by British owners at the time of Jay's 
treaty and claimed afterward as property under its protec- 
tion." (3) " Those who since the Territory had come under 
American customs had been brought into it from the States 
in which slavery was lawful."^ 

When the habitants of Vincennes and the Illinois, alarmed 
by the sixth article of compact, called upon Governor St. 
Clair to explain its meaning, he promptly replied that it was 
not retroactive but prospective ; " a declaration of a principle 
which was to govern the legislature in all acts respecting 
that matter, and the courts of justice in their decisions in 
cases arising after the date of the Ordinance." He argued that 
had Congress intended to emancipate the slaves in the Terri- 
tory, compensation would have been made to their owners. 
Congress had " the right to determine that property of that 
kind afterwards acquired should not be protected in future, 
and that slaves imported into the Territory after that declara- 
tion might reclaim their freedom."' This was the theory on 
which the various Territorial governments of the Northwest 
appear to have been administered. For example, the revenue 
laws of the Territory of Illinois levied a tax upon slaves ; and 
Congress, that had the power of revising all such laws, in this 
case never exercised its power. However, in one instance a 
court of law materially limited this ground. The Chief 
Justice of the Territory of Michigan, in a case that arose at 
Detroit in 1807, held that the sixth article was absolute, save 
as modified by Jay's Treaty. These are his words : " A right 



' Notes, 283. ' Michigan, 131, 132. 

^ St. Clair Papers, I., 205, 206. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 341 

of property in the human species cannot exist in this Territory 
except as to persons in the actual possession of British settlers 
in the Territory on June i, 1796, and that every other man 
coming into this Territory is by the law of the land a freeman, 
unless he be a fugitive from lawful labor and service in some 
other American State or territory." ' Chief Justice Wood- 
bridge accordingly refused to return to their owners fugitive 
slaves from Canada escaping into Michigan, thereby causing 
no little bad blood. In 1807, it may be remarked, the guar- 
antee given the French slave-owners by England was more 
than forty years old, and had no other than an historical in- 
terest. 

Under the operation of the Ordinance such slavery as 
existed in 1787 slowly but surely died out. However, black 
slaves were still found in Illinois as late as 1846 or 1847; and 
an ancient " Pani," who had been a slave in his earlier life, 
lived in Detroit to as late a date.^ 

The active and dangerous championship of slavery in the 
Northwest did not come from the French inhabitants. The 
New England and Middle State emigrants were generally op- 
posed to slavery ; but the larger number of the emigrants from 
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky, accustomed to slaves, 
and finding in the Ohio Valley physical conditions very sim- 
ilar to those they left behind them, not unnaturally desired 
its introduction. Accordingly, they united with the slave- 
holders already on the ground in a series of attempts per- 
manently to break down or temporarily to set aside the inhi- 
bition. A petition asking the suspension of Article VI. was 
met by an adverse report in the House of Representatives in 
May, 1796. 

In 1799, officers of the Virginia line, desiring to remove with 
their slaves to the Virginia Military District, between the 



' Cooley : Michigan, 137. 

^ Edwards : History of Illinois, 180, 184 ; and Campbell : Political History 
of Michigan, 246, 247. 



342 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



Scioto and Miami Rivers, petitioned the Territorial Legislature 
for permission to do so; but the peremptory language of the 
Ordinance gave that body no such discretion and the peti- 
tion was refused. The granting of the petition would have 
brought into the Territory, says Burnet, " a great accession of 
wealth, strength, and intelligence ; yet the public feeling, on 
the subject of admitting slavery into the Territory, was such, 
that the request would have been denied by a unanimous vote 
if the legislature had possessed the power of granting it. 
They were not only opposed to slavery on the ground of its 
being a moral evil, in violation of personal right, but were of 
opinion that, whatever might be its immediate advantages 
it would ultimately retard the settlement and check the pros- 
perity of the Territory, by making labor less reputable and 
creating feelings and habits unfriendly to the simplicity and 
industry they desired to encourage and perpetuate." ' But it 
is impossible to harmonize such a unanimous and decided 
anti-slavery sentiment as this with the admitted facts of history. 
In December, 1802, a delegate convention held at Vin- 
cennes, the capital of the new Territory of Indiana, called and 
presided over by Governor William Henry Harrison, again 
memorialized Congress to set aside the sixth compact; and in 
the following March, John Randolph, as chairman of a special 
committee to which the memorial and a letter of the same 
tenor from Governor Harrison had been referred, reported it 
inexpedient to grant the prayer. The argument of the re- 
port is in these words : 

"The rapid population of the State of Ohio sufficiently 
evinces, in the opinion of your committee, that the labor of 
slaves is not necessary to promote the growth and settlement of 
colonies in that region ; that this labor, demonstrably the dear- 
est of any, can only be employed in the cultivation of products 
more valuable than any known to that quarter of the United 
States ; that the committee deem it highly dangerous and in- 

' Notes, 306, 307. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 343 

expedient to impair a provision wisely calculated to promote 
the happiness and prosperity of the Northwestern country, 
and to give strength and security to that extensive frontier. 
In the salutary operation of this sagacious and benevolent re- 
straint, it is believed that the inhabitants of Indiana will, at no 
very distant day, find ample remuneration for a temporary 
privation of labor and of emigration." 

However, the people of Indiana, refusing to accept Mr. 
Randolph's view of the case, continued to call upon Congress 
for the suspension of the obnoxious article. In every one of 
the years 1804, 1806, 1807, committees of the House of Rep- 
resentatives reported favorably to their wishes, but the House, 
for some reason now unknown, never acted on the reports. 
Governor Harrison and the Indiana Legislature now took 
their cause to the Senate, where they encountered an adverse 
report from a special committee. This, however, did not put 
an end to attempts to secure the admission of slavery into the 
Territory and State.^ But it must not be supposed that the 
people of Indiana were unanimous in desiring the introduction 
of slavery. The citizens of Clark County, for example, sent 
a vigorous counter-memorial to Congress in November, 1807. 
These citizens say: "When we take into consideration the 
vast emigration into this Territory — and of citizens, too, de- 
cidedly opposed to the measure — we feel satisfied that, at all 
events, Congress will suspend any legislative act on this sub- 
ject until we shall, by the Constitution, be admitted into the 
Union, and have a right to adopt such a constitution, in this 
respect, as may comport with the wishes of a majority of the 
citizens." ^ 

In 1807 the Indiana Legislature passed an act authorizing 
the owners of negroes and mulattoes more than fifteen years 
of age to bring them into the Territory, and to have them 
bound to service by indenture for such time as the master and 

' St. Clair Papers, I., 120-122. 
'Dillon : History of Indiana, 410-414. 



344 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



slave might agree upon. If within thirty days of the time hd 
was brought into the Territory the slave would not consent to 
be indentured, then his owner should have sixty days in which 
to remove him into any State where slavery existed. The 
law also permitted any person to bring slaves under fifteen 
years of age into the Territory, and to hold them to service — • 
the males until the age of thirty-five, the females until the 
age of thirty-two years. Male children, born in the Terri- 
tory of a parent of color owing service by indenture, should 
serve the master until the age of thirty years, female chil- 
dren until the age of twenty-eight years. This act continued 
in force until 1810. On the Territorial Statute Book are 
also found very repressive acts concerning servants. This act 
was continued in force by the Illinois Legislature after the 
division of the Territory. In 18 14 the same legislature passed 
a law providing that slaves might, with consent of their 
owners, hire themselves in the Territory for a term not ex- 
ceeding one year ; and that such act should not in any way 
affect the master's right of property in them in the State or 
territory where they belonged. The preamble of this act as- 
signs as reasons for its provisions that mills cannot be erected 
or other needed improvements made, for want of laborers ; 
and, particularly, that the manufacture of salt, the supply of 
which should be abundant and the price low, cannot be car- 
ried on by means of white men. Still further, an act passed 
in 1 81 2 forbade the emigration of free negroes to the Terri- 
tory of Illinois under severe penalties ; and enjoined free ne- 
groes already there to register themselves and their children 
in the office of the Clerk of the County Court, also under 
severe penalties. 

When one remembers that the Northwest was covered on 
two sides by slave territory, from which it was separated only 
by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, he appreciates the facil- 
ities that such enactments as the foregoing gave for evading 
the intent of the sixth compact of the Ordinance. Comment 
is not needed to show that the ingenuity here displayed could 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 345 

have invented a system of enforced labor not at all inferior to 
that devised by some of the Southern States under President 
Johnson's reconstruction scheme. Moreover, these enact- 
ments explain certain provisions respecting indentures in the 
first Constitutions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois that would 
otherwise be inexplicable. 

The constitutional conventions of the three divisions of 
the Territory lying on the Ohio River offered opportunities 
for attacking the integrity of the Ordinance that in three in- 
stances were improved. 

Judge Burnet's " Notes " and Mr. William Henry Smith's 
" Life of St. Clair " do not convey the impression that an 
issue was really drawn in the Ohio Convention of 1802. But 
Judge Ephraim Cutler's Journal conveys that impression very 
distinctly. Those favorable to slavery took the ground that, 
however it might be with the Territory, the Ordinance could 
not bind a State unless the State herself, as a party to a com- 
pact, assented to it ; and they accordingly advocated a "mod- 
ified form " of servitude. Judge Cutler was a son of Dr. 
Manasseh Cutler, was one of the Washington County dele- 
gates to frame the constitution, and a member of the com- 
mittee charged with framing the bill of rights, of which John 
W. Brown was chairman. Cutler's Journal gives this account 
of proceedings in the committee : 

" An exciting subject was of course immediately brought be- 
fore the committee, the subject of admitting" or excluding slavery. 
Mr. Brown produced a section which defined the subject, in ef- 
fect, thus : No person shall be held in slavery if a male, after he 
is thirty-five years of age ; and if a female, after twenty-five 
years of age. I observed to the committee that those who had 
elected me to represent them tliere were desirous of having 
this matter clearly understood, and I must move to have the 
section laid upon the table until our next meeting, and to avoid 
any warmth of feeling, I hoped that each member of the com- 
mittee would prepare a section which should express his views 
fully on this important subject. The committee met the next 



346 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

morning, and I was called on for what I had proposed the last 
evening. I then read to theni the section as it now stands in 
the constitution. Mr. Brown observed that what he had intro- 
duced was thought by the greatest men in the nation to be, if 
established in our constitution, obtaining a great step toward 
a general emancipation of slavery, and was, in his opinion, 
greatly to be preferred to what I had offered." 

The section that Cutler prepared prohibited slavery in the 
very words of the Ordinance ; it forbade the holding, as a ser- 
vant, under pretence of indenture or otherwise, any male per- 
son twenty-one years of age, or female person eighteen years 
of age, unless such person had entered into the indenture 
while in a state of perfect freedom, and on condition of a bona 
fide consideration, received or to be received, for the service ; 
closing with the clause : " Nor shall any indenture of any 
negro or mulatto, hereafter made and executed out of this 
State, or, if made in the State, where the term of service ex- 
ceeds one year, be of the least validity, except those given in 
the case of apprenticeships." 

After a sharp discussion in the committee, the section was 
adopted by a majority of one, five votes to four. It now 
went to the convention, where " several attempts were made 
to weaken or obscure the sense of the section on its passage." 
In committee of the whole, a material change was introduced. 
Cutler was unwell, and so absent at the time. " I went to 
the convention," he continues, " and moved to strike out the 
obnoxious matter and made my objections as forcible as I was 
able, and when the vote was called Mr. Milligan changed his 
vote and we succeeded in placing it in its original state." 
Thus by a majority of only one, first in the committee and 
afterward in the convention itself, was the attempt to fasten 
a modified slavery upon the State of Ohio defeated. 

Judge Cutler understood President Jefferson to be the au- 
thor of the proposition which he so effectually opposed, and 
the " one of the greatest men in the nation " referred to by 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 347 

Mr. Brown. He gives as evidence for this opinion a conver- 
sation with Governor Worthington in Washington at the 
time Congress passed the law authorizing the convention, in 
which Worthington told him that Mr, Jefferson " had ex- 
pressed to him that such, or a similar article, might be intro- 
duced into the constitution, and he hoped there would not be 
any effort made for anything farther for the exclusion of sla- 
very, as it would operate against the interests of those who 
wished to emigrate from the slave States to Ohio." ' 

Judge Burnet says " much warmth of feeling " was mani- 
fested in the convention on the different propositions which 
were offered relating to the people of color then residing in 
the Territory, amounting probably to one or two hundred. 
These propositions, found in the "Journal of the Convention," 
were finally abandoned, in the fear that the feeling excited by 
them might defeat the object for which the convention was 
called. The judge says: "A few of the members were dis- 
posed to declare them citizens, to the full extent of that 
term ; while others contended against allowing them any 
other privilege than the protection of the laws, and exemp- 
tion from taxes and militia duty. Propositions were made 
to declare them ineligible to any ofifiice, civil or military ; also 

1 The statements made above in regard to the slavery question in the Ohio 
convention, are given on the authority of the leading actor on the free-State 
side. See Life and Times of Ephraim Cutler, Prepared from his Journals and 
Correspondence, Cincinnati, 1890, pp. 74-77. Governor Morrow is called as 
a witness to prove that Mr. Jefferson favored the admission of slavery into Ohio 
for a limited period of time. The facts have commonly been ignored and 
sometimes denied altogether. The editors of the Life of Rev. Manasseh Cutler 
say : "' This effort was supported by Jefferson's favorite theory of States rights. 
The advocates of the measure claimed that, as soon as the State assumed its 
own autonomy and became a sovereign among others, it had the right to decide 
upon the provisions of au ordinance which was the act of only one party, the 
general government. The central and southern portions of the State then had 
a majority of the population, and the labor of slaves would have suited the in- 
terests of their fertile valleys, while the political prospects of the new and rising 
' States ' rights democracy would have been advanced by holding out such a 
premium for emigration from Virginia and Kentucky " (L, 348). 



348 THE OLD NORTHWEST; 

to exclude them from being examined as witnesses in courts 
of justice against white persons." ' Colored men were ex- 
cluded from the basis of representation and from the suffrage. 
The sentiments of hostility to negroes that appeared in the 
Convention afterward ripened in the infamous " Black Laws " 
of Ohio, the last vestiges of which were not swept from the 
statute-book until 1887. 

In Indiana the conflict was much more severe and lasted 
much longer than in Ohio. The later trend of opinion 
and the final result were pointed out in the last chapter. 
The constitution prohibited slavery or involuntary servitude 
in the words of the compact of 1787; but the prohibition 
was coupled with the proviso, " nor shall any indenture of 
any negro or mulatto hereafter made without the State be 
of the least validity within the State," which apparently 
recognized indentures made within the State. 

In no one of the three States bordering the Ohio was 
there such a determined effort made to nullify the sixth com- 
pact as in Illinois. This was partly due to the geographical 
position of the State, and partly to the character of the popu- 
lation. The lower part of the State projects, wedge-like, into 
what was then slave territory. It was as well adapted to 
slave labor as Kentucky on the one side or Missouri on the 
other. Its commercial connections, in 18 18, were with the 
down-the-river country. Here was the stronghold of slavery 
in the day of French domination. Here came the first emi- 
grants in the new regime. Long before the New Englanders 
and Middle State men had reached the Central and Northern 
parts of the State, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, Carolinians, 
and Virginians made their way by the Ohio and its affluents 
into this new " Egypt." Nearly all these people were accus- 
tomed to slavery ; many of them were " poor whites," and 
were intensely eager to acquire that badge of distinction in 
the States from which they came, the ownership of slaves ; 

1 Notes, 354, 355. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 349 

many of them, too, were very ignorant, and nearly all were 
strongly prejudiced against the " Yankees," as they called all 
people from the free States. In a word, early Illinois was 
homogeneous with Kentucky or Tennessee in many features, 
including devotion to slavery. No attempt was made in the 
convention that framed the constitution of 18 18 to abrogate 
the Ordinance in terms, but the provisions now to be men- 
tioned subverted its substance. 

In room of a prohibition of slavery we find the following : 
*' Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall liereafter be 
introduced into this State, otherwise than for the punishment 
of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; " 
a plain, practical recognition of the slavery already existing. 
The Ohio clauses in regard to indentures were copied word for 
word. Slaves holden in other States should not be hired to 
labor in Illinois save in the salt-works tract near Shawneetown ; 
nor hired for a longer time than one year, or after the year 
1825. The last of the three sections devoted to the subject 
legalized the contracts and indentures already existing in virt- 
ue of the laws of Illinois Territory, but provided that the 
children hereafter born of such indentured persons, negroes or 
mulattoes, should become free, the males at the age of twenty- 
one, the females at the age of eighteen years. 

When the resolution declaring the admission of Illinois to 
the Union was on its passage through the House of Repre- 
sentatives, Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, opposed its adop- 
tion on the ground that it contravened the sixth article of the 
Ordinance. He felt himself constrained to come to the con- 
clusion that the sections of the constitution described above 
embraced a complete recognition of existing slavery, if not 
providing for its future introduction and toleration. He con- 
trasted the Illinois and the Indiana Constitutions, to the dis- 
advantage of the former. Thirty-four votes were registered 
in the House against the resolution. 

But the real battle in Illinois followed the constitution. 
In 1822 Edward Coles was elected Governor of Illinois over 



350 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

three competitors. There were no proper political parties or 
issues in the State at the time, and elections turned largely on 
local questions and personal preferences ; there was a strong 
tendency to divide along the slavery-line, but this line was 
not so tightly drawn as to prevent two pro-slavery candidates 
from entering the field. Coles was well understood to be an 
anti-slavery man. The pro-slavery candidates together had 
5,302 votes, to 3,332 for all others, and Coles was elected by 
a plurality of only 50. In his sj^eech to the legislature the 
Governor spoke of the existence of slavery in the State as a 
violation of the Ordinance of 1787, and strongly recommended 
its abolition. He also advised a general revisal of the Black 
Code of the State. These recommendations led to action 
very different from what the Governor desired. 

Up to this point the pro-slavery men had proceeded upon 
the theory that the Ordinance must be formally observed 
until the State was fairly in the Union. They now invented 
a new theory, or perhaps extended the old one. As devel- 
oped by a committee of the legislature, this theory was " that 
the people of Illinois have now the same right to alter their 
constitution as the people of the State of Virginia, or any 
other of the original States, and may make any disposition of 
negro slaves they choose, without any breach of faith or vio- 
lation of compact, ordinances, or acts of Congress." ' The 
slave-owners in the State held their slaves by the various 
titles that have been described. In 1818 these had been 
thought sufficient ; but now the Governor's bold challenge, 
and the increase of the " Yankee " population, began to shake 
their confidence and drive them to the conclusion that noth- 
ing short of a constitution sanctioning slavery would make 
them perfectly safe. Accordingly, the pro-slavery men in the 
legislature, by resorting to the most flagrant breaches of 
parliamentary law and of common justice, carried a proposi- 
tion, by the requisite two-thirds vote of both Houses, to sub- 

' Washburne : Sketch of Edward Coles, 68. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 35 1 

mit the question of a constitutional convention to the people. 
This proposition was adopted at the winter session, 1822-23; 
but, fortunately, it could not be voted on until August, 1824. 
VVe can glance at only two or three features of the remarka- 
ble contest that now followed. 

The men who passed through this struggle could hardly 
find, in after years, language strong enough to describe its 
violence and bitterness. " Men, women, and children entered 
the arena of party warfare and strife ;" " families and neigh- 
borhoods were so divided and furious and bitter against one 
another, that it seemed a regular civil war might be the re- 
sult;" "many personal combats were indulged in;" "the 
press teemed Avith publications;" "stump orators were in- 
voked;" "the pulpit thundered;" "old friendships were 
sundered ; " " threats of personal violence were frequent ; " 
" pistols and dirks were in great demand ; " " the whole peo- 
ple, for the space of months, did scarcely anything but read 
newspapers, handbills, and pamphlets, quarrel, wrangle, and 
argue with each other whenever they met together to hear 
the violent harangues of their orators " — these are excerpts 
from the accounts that have come down to us. On the pro- 
slavery side, especially, the campaign was marked by violence, 
passion, appeals to ignorance and subterfuge, partially re- 
lieved by those half-true arguments that have so often done 
duty in defence of slavery. The social and industrial condi- 
tion of the State gave that side a great advantage. 

"The times were hard. The farmer could find no market 
for his abundant crops. Manufactures languished, improve- 
ments were at a standstill, and the mechanic was witliout work. 
The country was cursed by a fluctuating and irredeemable 
paper currency, which had driven all real money out of circu- 
lation. The flow of emigration to the State had in a great 
measure ceased, but a great emigration passed through the 
State to Missouri. Great numbers of well-to-do emigrants 
from the slave States, taking with them their slaves, were then 
leaving their homes to find new ones west of the Mississippi. 



352 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

When passing through Illinois to their destination, with their 
well equipped emigrant wagons, drawn by splendid horses, with 
their retinue of slaves, and with all the lordly airs of that class 
of slave-holders, they avowed that their only reason for not set- 
tling in Illinois was that they could not hold their slaves. This 
fact had a very great influence, particularly in that part of the 
State through which the emigration passed, and people de- 
nounced the unwise provision of the constitution prohibiting 
slavery, and thus preventing a great influx of population, to 
add to the wealth of the State." ' 

From the first, the propagandists fought a losing battle. 
When the end was finally reached, the vote stood : For a con- 
vention, 4,950; against a convention, 6,822 — being a majority 
of 1,872 in a total vote of 11,772. In view of this large ma- 
jority, the subsequent political history of Illinois for thirty 
years is very remarkable. The State passed almost at once 
into the hands of a powerful and violent pro-slavery party, and 
thus remained until the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
brought about a new combination of political forces. But the 
attempt to enthrone slavery in the citadel of the State con- 
stitution was not renewed. 

Generally speaking, the leading free-State men in this ex- 
traordinary contest were from the North, the slave-State men 
from the South. The one shining exception on the free-State 
side was the incomparable leader, Edward Coles. Born in Albe- 
marle County, Va., in 1784, Governor Coles was one of those 
gentlemen of cultivation and fortune of whom the Old Do- 
minion, in the last century, produced so many, who profoundly 
believed American slavery to be an economical mistake, a po- 
litical evil, and a moral wrong. He belonged to the Virginia 
school of politics, and saw much public service before remov- 
ing to the West. Popular in his manners, calm in his judg- 
ment and temper, strong in his political and social connec- 
tions, able and polished in his addresses to his fellow-citizens, 

' Washburne : Sketch of Edward Coles, 132, 133. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST, 353 

easy in his fortune, which he freely used for the public good, 
making his appeal to the popular reason and conscience rather 
than to ignorance and passion, the governor of the State, and 
residing at the capital, where he could make his influence 
felt — he was the very leader who was needed. To him has 
always been adjudged the honor of defeating the scheme to 
make Illinois a slave State. But the further fact must be 
told, that this statesman and benefactor was the object of an 
unrelenting persecution from the day that he communicated 
his views on slavery to the legislature until, shaking the Illi- 
nois dust from his feet, he removed to Philadelphia, in 1833. 
Mr. Coles removed from Virginia to Illinois', because he would 
not longer consent to live in a slave State. He emancipated 
his slaves, because he would not longer consent to be the 
owner of property in man. He took his negroes with him to 
his new home, taking good care to make suitable provision 
for their material well-being. In executing this benevolent 
purpose, he failed to conform to the terms of a law, that had 
never been published and the existence of which was not 
commonly known, regulating the residence of free negroes in 
the State. For this offence he was harassed with litigation, 
and adjudged to pay a fine of $2,000, which, however, was 
finally remitted. All in all, it does not seem extravagant to 
say that Mr. Coles's arrival in the State, in 18 19, was more 
important in its results than the arrival of any other man since 
Clark summoned Kaskaskia to surrender in 1778. 

The slaver)^ struggle in the Northwestern States was 
Avatched with keen interest by statesmen at a distance. Al- 
bert Gallatin wrote to his Genevan friend Badollet, who had 
become a citizen of that State : " If you have had a share in 
preventing the establishment of slavery in Indiana, you will 
have done more to that part of the country at least than com- 
monly falls to the share of man." ' And W. H. Crawford of 
Georgia, himself a slave-holder, cheered the heart of Gov- 

' Cooley : Michigan, 135. 
23 



354 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ernor Coles in the Illinois contest with the words: " Is it pos- 
sible that your convention is intended to introduce slavery 
into the State ? I acknowledge, if I were a citizen, I should 
oppose it with great earnestness ; where it has ever been intro- 
duced it is extremely difficult to get rid of and ought to be 
treated with great delicacy." ' Other reasons for calling a 
convention were assigned in the controversy, but slavery was 
the only real issue. 

The attentive reader of the preceding history will not 
fail to see several places where events might easily have taken 
some other direction. Nor will he fail to ask, " With what 
final results?" What if Ohio or Indiana had formed a 
slave constitution? What if Illinois had actually made the 
proposed change in 1824? What would Congress and the 
Supreme Court, possibly, have done with the hard questions 
that would have arisen in such a contingency ? And if one 
or both of those States had become slave States, what then ? 
What would have happened if slave- State men had been in a 
majority in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois no one can do more 
than conjecture. Fortunately, at the decisive tests the free- 
State men were in the majority. Moreover, the Ordinance 
helped to create that majority as well as to protect it against 
assault. Governor Reynolds, who had lived in Illinois since 
1800 and who was a slave-State man in 1824, although he 
afterward rejoiced at his own defeat, said, in 1855 : " This 
Act of Congress was the great sheet-anchor that secured the 
States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois from slavery, I never 
had any doubt but slavery would now exist in Illinois, if it 
had not been prevented by this famous Ordinance." * Never, 
perhaps, in the history of political controversy was the advan- 
tage of winning the victory before the battle was fought more 
happily illustrated. 

In the sixty-two years following the adoption of the Na- 
tional Constitution, eighteen jiew States were brought into 

' Wasliburne : Sketch of Governor Coles, 131. - My Own Times. 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 355 

the American Union — nine free and nine slave States. Not 
only were the numbers of free and slave States equal, but in 
several instances one of each kind came in together, or nearly 
so, as though they had been born twins. It has long been 
the habit, at least in the Northern States, to attribute these 
so-called "double births" to the management of statesmen, 
and particularly Southern statesmen, determined to perpetu- 
ate the balance of freedom and slavery in the Senate and, as 
far as possible, in the electoral colleges and in the House of 
Representatives. It is true that, from the first, there were 
men who were interested, on general principles, in preserving 
this balance ; true that the Slave Power, after it came upon 
the scene with distinct ideas and purposes of its own, had no 
greater interest in any political subject than in this one ; also 
true that, when it became demonstrably apparent, as it did 
about 1 850, that this balance could not be maintained, the more 
ultra- Southerners began to take new interest in the idea of an 
independent slave republic. But it is important to observe 
that the coming of the Slave Power upon the scene with such 
ideas and purposes was later than the majority of men, prone 
to carry too far backward the facts with which they are per- 
sonally familiar, suppose. To fix definitely its arrival may 
be difficult, or impossible. Certainly, the annexation neither of 
Louisiana nor of Florida, although the South profited by both, 
was a Southern measure. Everything considered, the fittest 
time to fix upon is the demand for the annexation of Texas. 
But that annexation was as largely the result of Manifest 
Destiny as of slavery aggression. It is also important to ob- 
serve that, until the Northern States, like the " frozen North " 
in the first centuries, burst their barriers, and poured their 
floods of population into the Lake Basin and the upper parts 
of the Mississippi Valley, which followed the opening of the 
great thoroughfares to the West, of which the Erie Canal was 
the first, the West and the South were much more homoge- 
neous in thought, in temper, and in manners than the West 
and New England ; and, even after that flow began in large 



356 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

volume, the terms "East" and "West" had more political 
significance than the terms " North " and " South." What 
was really Western, or, at most, Southern-Western, sentiment 
has often been taken for the distinct and peculiar sentiment 
of the South. It is really worth remembering that, when dis- 
union was first heard of, the dividing line proposed ran along 
the Alleghany Mountains. Witness the letter written by 
Washington to Governor Harrison in 1784, already quoted 
from. 

The creation of the new free and slave States was due to 
causes far more powerful than state-craft. In 1787 the At- 
lantic Plain and the West marched together from the Gulf of 
Mexico to the Northern Lakes. The northern half of the 
Plain was free, the southern half slave, soil. The Southern 
population was inferior in numbers to the Northern popula- 
tion, but it had the advantage of position. As a whole, it 
was much nearer to the West. Two of the four channels 
of Western emigration headed within the limits of the South. 
A third channel, and for a time the most important of all, be- 
longed to the South in common with the North. As a con- 
sequence, the two kinds of population, taking a term of years 
together, reached the Western country in about equal num- 
bers, moving mainly along parallels of latitude. Still further, 
the line separating free-labor and slave-labor productions, the 
economical and political consequences of which Professor J. 
E. Cairnes so clearly pointed out in his " Slave Power," di- 
vides the West, as it divides the East, into two nearly equal 
parts. In this respect, therefore, freedom and slavery had 
about equal advantages. A still further consideration is, that 
the cotton-gin and other mechanical inventions enormously 
increased the demand for cotton about the time that the new 
lands were laid open to settlement. He who considers all 
these things, in connection with the facts of Western geography, 
must see that the expansion of the areas of freedom and of sla- 
very in the United States was due to natural causes, and par- 
ticularly that the organization and admission of States accord- 



SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 357 

ing to programme, were as much beyond the ken and power of 
statesmen as the regulation of the tides and eclipses is beyond 
the power of natural philosophers. There were cases when 
the admission of States was hastened or retarded somewhat 
by political management growing out of slavery. But the 
" balance" theory is wholly at variance with the facts pertain- 
ing to the admission of the earlier States. For example, 
Kentucky came into the Union in 1792, and Tennessee in 
1796, each having a population of seventy-five thousand or 
more. Ohio was admitted in 1803, Indiana in 18 16, and Illi- 
nois in 18 18, each with a population of about forty-five thou- 
sand.' The reconciliation of the case of Ohio with the 
" balance" theory, in particular, would require the reversal of 
all the most important facts connected with its admission. 

Note. — The subject of slavery in the Old Northwest, and par- 
ticularly the bearing upon that question of the Ordinance of 1787, 
has been investigated with much thoroughness by J. P. Dunn, In- 
diana, in American Commonwealths. The alternative title of this 
work is " A Redemption from Slavery." See also, Slavery Petitions 
and Papers, edited by Mr. Dunn, Indianapolis, 1894. Dr. Justin 
Winsor's depreciatory view of the Ordinance of 1787 is set forth in 
his work entitled The Westward Movement, Chap. XIV. 

1 The population of Kentucky in 1790 was 73,677; of Tennessee, in 1790, 
35,691; in 1800, 105,602; Ohio, including Michigan, in 1800,45,365; of Indiana, 
in 1810, 24,520; in 1820, 147,178; of Illinois, in 1820, 55,163. 



XIX. 

THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 

One effect of the release and cession of Western lands 
that Connecticut made, September 14, 1786, was to leave her 
in possession of the territory bounded north by the line of 
42° 2', or, rather, the international line, east by the western 
boundary of Pennsylvania, south by the forty-first parallel, 
and west by a line parallel with the eastern boundary and dis- 
tant from it one hundred and twenty miles — supposed, at the 
time, to be equal in extent to the Susquehanna tract given to 
Pennsylvania, 1782. Connecticut's claim included both the 
soil and the jurisdiction. If the territory belonged to her at 
all, it belonged to her in a sense as full and absolute as any 
town or county within her present limits. This territory 
Connecticut was said " to reserve," and it soon came to be 
called " The Connecticut Western Reserve," " The Western 
Reserve," etc. These names were popular in their origin, but 
they were not long in making their way into legal and histori- 
cal documents. The disposition to be made of these lands 
became at once an interesting State question. 

In October, 1786, a month after the cession, the General 
Assembly determined to offer the lands lying east of the 
Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas Rivers for sale. It accordingly di- 
rected that they be surveyed into townships six miles square, 
fixed terms of sale, dedicated five hundred acres in every 
township to the support of schools and the same quantity to 
the support of the Gospel, promised two hundred and forty 
acres, in fee simple, in every township, to the first minister 
who should settle in it, and guaranteed peace and good order 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 359 

to the settlers under the jurisdiction of the State until it 
should resign its jurisdiction to Congress and local govern- 
ment be established. Beyond the Salt-springs Tract of 24,000 
acres, lying in the Mahoming Valley, sold to General S. H. 
Parsons, which was not surveyed or settled until many years 
afterward, nothing was done in pursuance of this legislation. 

On May 11, 1792, the General Assembly quit-claimed to 
the inhabitants of several Connecticut towns who had lost 
property in consequence of the incursions into the State made 
by the British troops in the Revolution, or their legal repre- 
sentatives when they were dead, and to their heirs and assigns, 
forever, 500,000 acres lying across the western end of the Re- 
serve, bounded north by the lake shore, said lands to be di- 
vided among the grantees in proportion to their respective 
losses as found and reported by a committee previously ap- 
pointed by the assembly. The total number of sufferers, as 
reported, was 1,870, and the aggregate losses, ^161,548 lis. 
€y^d. The grant was of the soil only. These lands are known 
in Connecticut history as " The Sufferers' Lands," in Ohio 
history as " The Fire Lands." In 1796 the Sufferers were in- 
corporated in Connecticut, and in 1803 in Ohio, under the 
title, " The Proprietors of the Half-million Acres of Land lying 
south of Lake Erie." In due time the lands were surveyed 
into one hundred and twenty tracts, each tract being one- 
fourth of a township, or about four thousand acres.' Next, 
the share-holders were arranged in "classifications," i, 2, 3, 4, 
etc., up to 120; each "classification" footing up one one-hun- 
dred and twentieth part of the whole stock, or ;^ 1,343 7s. 
The tracts of land were now apportioned to the " classifica- 
tions " by lot, and a careful registration made of the results. 
Nothing remained for the share-holders making up a " classifi- 
cation " to do, but to dispose of the tract of land that they had 
drawn, in any manner agreeable to themselves : To sell it in an 



' There were also some broken tracts that were subdivided, and then added 
to the 120 to " equahze " them. 



36q the old northwest. 

undivided form, to divide it among themselves by agreement, 
or to resort to the courts for proceedings in partition. Con- 
necticut gave no deed to the Fire Lands other than the act of 
the legislature making the appropriation ; and this act, the 
" classifications," and the record of " drawings," all recorded 
and made legal evidence by the State, are the ultimate title. 
An abstract of title, therefore, in Huron or Erie County, O., 
always begins with a statement of the historical circumstances 
now recounted. The drawings of the Fire Lands were made 
November 9, 1808, and their settlement began soon after. 

In May, 1793, the Connecticut Assembly offered the re- 
maining part of the Reserve for sale ; and in October follow- 
ing it enacted that the moneys received should be a perpet- 
ual fund, the interest of which should be appropriated to the 
several ecclesiastical societies or churches of all denominations 
in the State, to be by them applied to the support of their re- 
spective ministers and schools of education. This legislation 
caused a profound agitation throughout the State that finally 
led to its repeal. 

In May, 1795, the General Assembly the third time of- 
fered the lands for sale. It fixed terms and conditions, ap- 
pointed a committee to negotiate the sale, and set apart the 
proceeds as a perpetual fund, the interest of which should be 
appropriated to the support of schools.' In the September 



' The Connecticul School Fund, which amounts to something more than two 
million dollars, consists wholly of the proceeds of those lands and of capitalized 
interest. Hon. C. D. Hine, the Secretary of the State Board of Education, 
questions the current opinion that this fund has promoted the cause of public 
education. He says : 

"The School Fund derived from the sale of Western lands yielded an income 
last year of $120,855, which amounts to 80 cents for each person of the school-age. 
The average expense of educating each of these persons throughout the State is 
$10.31, so that the fund now furnishes about eight per cent, of the total cost. 
In those towns and cities where the people insist upon good schools, no reliance 
is placed upon these permanent funds. Indeed, the history of our Stale shows 
conclusively that at the time when the fund was most productive, yielding $1.40 
or $1.50 for each person of the school-age, and when towns depended upon it, 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 361 

following this legislation the committee sold the lands in a 
body, without survey or measurement, to thirty-five purchas- 
ers, who severally agreed to pay stipulated sums that, together, 
made up twelve hundred thousand dollars, the price of the 
tract agreed upon. The committee made as many deeds as 
there were purchasers. The deed granted to the purchaser, 
in behalf of the State of Connecticut, and to his heirs forever, 
all right, title, and interest, "juridical and territorial," in and to 
a certain number of twelve hundred-thousandths of the lands 
described, to be held by the said purchaser as tenant in com- 
mon of said whole tract or territory with the other purchas- 
ers, and not in severalty. The number of undivided shares 
that each purchaser received was the same as the number of 
dollars that he had agreed to pay toward the purchase-money. 
The term " purchaser " is here used in the legal sense ; the 
number of persons interested in the purchase being much 
larger than the number of purchasers. The sale was made on 
credit ; the purchasers at the time gave their bonds for the 
amount of the several contracts, with personal security, but 
afterward they gave mortgages on the lands. 

Such are some of the more important facts pertaining to 
the largest land-sale, so far as the quantity of land sold is 
concerned, ever made in the State of Ohio. It was a large 
transaction of any kind for the time. Moreover, it was fol- 

as they generally did, for the support of their schools, the schools themselves 
were poor and short. In fact, this was the darkest period of our educational ex- 
perience. A very striking deterioration took place as soon as the fund became 
productive and the income began to be distributed. Before that period schools 
had been maintained at least six months, and at most nearly the whole year, 
according to the size of the district. After, and not long after, this new source 
of income was opened, the usual length of schools was reduced to only three 
months, or just the time that this fund would maintain the schools. The sums 
which came as gratuities relieved the people of responsibility and deadened their 
interest, until the schools were continued only so long as the charity lasted. Hap- 
pily, the danger from this direction is passed and cannot return. The fund has 
probably reached its greatest productiveness, and the per capita will constantly 
decrease. The public schools must draw their sustenance from the people who 
are directly or indirectly benefited by them." — The Nation, No. 1076. 



362 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

lowed at once by events of far more than a temporary or local 
interest. 

The purchasers of the Reserve, most of them belonging 
to Connecticut, but some to Massachusetts and New York, 
were men desirous of trying their fortunes in Western lands. 
Oliver Phelps, perhaps the greatest land-speculator of the 
time, was at their head. September 5, 1795, they adopted 
articles of agreement and association, constituting themselves 
the Connecticut Land Company. The company was never 
incorporated, but was what is called to-day a " syndicate." 
They divided the stock into four hundred shares of $3,000 
each. They determined to survey the lands into townships 
of five miles square. They appointed seven directors and 
three trustees, with defined powers and functions. In April, 
1796, the company adopted a very elaborate method of par- 
titioning the lands. Six townships should be offered for sale 
for the benefit of the company as such. Four townships should 
be surveyed into four hundred tracts of one hundred and 
sixty acres each, to be distributed among the share-holders 
by lot. The remaining lands should be divided into " equal- 
ized " parcels, to be distributed in the same way : (i) A cer- 
tain number of the best townships should be set apart as 
standard townships ; (2) certain other townships and parts 
of townships should be cut up into tracts, to be added (3) to 
the remaining townships to equalize them with the best ones. 

In the spring of the same year the directors sent out the 
first party of surveyors, consisting, all told, of fifty persons. 
The party assembled at Schenectady, and ascended the Mo- 
hawk to Fort Stanwix, whence most of them passed, with the 
boats and stores, over the portage to Wood Creek, and then 
down that stream, Oneida Lake, and Oswego River to Lake 
Ontario ; but some made their way by Canandaigua, then the 
Western outpost of civilization on that route, to Buffalo 
Creek. The British garrison holding Fort Oswego caused 
those who went by that route some inconvenience, calling 
out from one of the surveyors the observation : " Such are 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 363 

the effects of allowing the British Government to exist on 
the continent of America.'" At Buffalo the agent bought 
of the Indians their remaining claim to the lands east of the 
Cuyahoga River for iJ^SOO, New York currency in trade, two 
beef cattle, and one hundred gallons of whiskey. From 
Buffalo the surveyors made their way westward along the 
south shore of the lake, reaching the mouth of Conneaut 
Creek, where they fixed their base of operations, July 4th. 
Here their first act was to celebrate the twentieth anniversary 
of American Independence, which they did with much enthu- 
siasm. Two of the toasts ran thus : 

" May the Port of Independence [as they christened the 
place], and the fifty sons and daughters who have entered it 
this day, be successful and prosperous." " May these sons and 
daughters multiply in sixteen years sixteen times fifty." ^ 

The settlement of the Western Reserve properly dates 
from this celebration. General Moses Cleaveland, the agent 
in charge, with a few companions, soon moved on to the west, 
reaching the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, July 22d, from 
which day there have always been white men on the site of 
the city that takes its name from him.'' 

The western boundary of Pennsylvania, as run ten years 
before, and the parallel forty-one degrees north, now run for 
the first time, were the base-lines of the survey.^ The courses 

' Whittlesey : Early History of Cleveland, 174. 

* Whittlesey : Early History of Cleveland, 182. In 1810 the population of 
the Reserve was 16,092. 

* " It was in 1830 that a newspaper called The Cleveland Advertiser was estab- 
lished. In preparing to issue the first number, the editor discovered that the 
heading was too long to fit the form, and so, in order to adjust it, he dropped 
out the letter 'a' in the first syllable of the word 'Cleaveland,' and made it 
read 'Cleveland.' The public at once accepted this change in orthography." — 
Rice : Sketches of Western Life, 23. 

* The western boundary of Pennsylvania has an interesting history. As early 
as the troubles with Virginia, the question arose, "From what point on the Del- 
aware shall the five degrees of longitude be measured ? " A glance at the map 
will show that different answers to this question would materially affect the 
State's westward extension. Messrs. Tilghman and Allen, the Pennsylvania 



364 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

north and south were called " ranges; " east and west, " town- 
ships." Cleveland is in No. 7 in range 12 ; that is, the 
seventh township counting from the southern boundary, and 
the twelfth counting from the eastern one. It was several 
years before the surveys were finished. The lands and other 
property of the company were drawn in four drafts — in 1798, 
1802, 1807, and 1809. The trustees, to whom all the lands 
had been deeded by the share-holders, in trust, in 1795, made 
the deeds ; and wdth the last draft the company was dis- 
solved, having been in existence fourteen years. 

As a land-speculation, the purchase of the Reserve was 
unfortunate. In 1795 the ideas concerning the southern 
shore of Lake Erie, dating from the old French days, had not 
been corrected ; and the company supposed they were buy- 
ing 4,000,000 acres of land. The survey proved that they 
had bought less than 3,000,000 acres.' Instead of thirty 

commissioners sent to Williamsburg in 1774, proposed that Mason and Dixon's 
line be run to a point five degrees from the river, and that from this point a 
series of zigzag lines be run northward, " similar to the courses of the Delaware." 
Lord Dunmore replied that the Crown could not have intended such a boundary 
as this, liecauseit was so "very inconvenient." The agreement of 1779 provided 
that Mason and Dixon's line should be run west five degrees from the river, and 
that a meridian line drawn from this point should be the western boundary of 
Pennsylvania. This meridian line was run in 1785 and 1786, Andrew Ellicott 
being the chief engineer. The line between Ohio and Pennsylvania was re-run 
and re-marked by a joint State commission, beginning in 1878. Virginia really 
fought the battle of Ohio against Pennsylvania. If the "zigzag" plan had been 
adopted, or if a meridian boundary had been run five degrees west of the west- 
ernmost point of the Delaware, Ohio would have shown very differently upon 
the map from what it does. The survey of parallel forty-one degrees was not 
completed till 1806. The line departs slightly from the true parallel as it runs 
westward ; but the Surveyor-General advised in 1810 that it be not disturbed.' 
See Chapman : The French in the Alleghany Valley, 197 et seq. Report of the 
joint commission appointed by the States of Pennsylvania and Ohio to ascertain 
and re-mark the boundary-line between said States. Whittlesey : Western Re- 
serve Historical Society, Tract No. 61. Historical Collections of the Mahoning 
Valley, L, 517 et seq. 

' The precise quantity of land in the purchase is matter of dispute. Perhaps 
2,837,109 acres is the best estimate. The same authority makes the whole Re- 
serve consist of 3,333,699 acres. Whittlesey, Early Hist, of Cleveland, 258, 259. 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 365 

cents an acre, they had paid more than forty cents. The ex- 
penses of the survey were much heavier than the company 
anticipated. And, finally, a jurisdictional question, having its 
origin in the charter of 1662, caused them much vexation and 
pecuniary loss, and even threatened to deprive them of the 
property altogether. 

The troubles of the Land Company began almost with its 
existence. It will be remembered that the State had sold to 
the company the juridical and territorial right, as well as the 
soil, of the tract. For a State to alienate the jurisdiction of 
one-half its territory to a company of land-speculators that 
never rose to the dignity of a body corporate and politic was 
certainly a remarkable proceeding. Whether the subject at- 
tracted much attention at the time, and, if so, what was the 
current theory of jurisdiction, are questions very dif^cult to 
answer. Colonel Charles Whittlesey, who studied the early 
history of the Western Reserve with great care, and who was 
himself a part of that history, remarks, touching this feature 
of the transaction : " So little was known at this time of the 
respective powers of the State and of the United States, un- 
der the Constitution of 1787, that many of the parties thought 
the Land Company had received political authority, and 
could found here a new State. They imagined themselves, 
like William Pcnn, to be proprietors, coupled with the rights 
of self-government." He says, also, that both parties to the 
transaction " imagined that the deed of Connecticut conveyed 
powers of civil government to the company, and that the 
grantees might organize a new State; " but adds that "the 
United States objected to this mode of setting up States." 
Whittlesey also speaks as though the establishment of a new 
State by the company was, at one time, a settled purpose. 
New Connecticut was to be governed from Hartford, as New 
England had been by the Council of Plymouth, in England.' 

' Early History of Cleveland, 167, 168 ; Early Civil Jurisdiction on the South 
Shore of Lake Erie, 4. 



366 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

A new State was certainly in the air in 1796. The second of 
the toasts drunk, in " several pails of grog," at the Conneaut 
celebration of the Fourth of July was : " The State of New 
Connecticut." But what part the company expected to play in 
establishing the new State is not very clear. If it ever im- 
agined itself clothed with juridical and territorial powers, it 
soon dismissed such a thought. 

By 1800 as many as twenty or thirty settlements had been 
begun on the Reserve. The census of that year reports a 
population of 1,302 souls. These facts point to a society, 
young and small, indeed, but active and growing, transacting 
the business incident to their condition, and accustomed, 
withal, to the forms and machinery of legal government. 
Lands were bought and sold ; contracts relating to personal 
services were entered into ; marriages were solemnized in vari- 
ous places. But there was no government whatever ; no laws 
or records, no magistrates or police. The people were thor- 
oughly trained in civil obedience ; they were orderly and fully 
competent to govern themselves ; and yet, in those three or 
four years, the need of civil institutions began to be severely 
felt. The lack of records, in particular, was a source of much 
embarrassment. 

It is impossible to state Avhether the relation of the Con- 
necticut Reserve to the Territory Northwest of the River 
Ohio was considered in 1787 or not; but Governor St. Clair 
included all that part of it lying east of the Cuyahoga River 
in Washington County, organized July 26, 1788. In 1796 he 
included the whole Reserve in Wayne County, the county 
seat of which was Detroit. Once more, July 29, 1797, he in- 
cluded the eastern part in Jefferson County. St. Clair pro- 
ceeded upon the theory that his jurisdiction extended over 
lands that had not been ceded to the United States, as well 
as over lands that had been ceded ; and perhaps this was the 
natural view for him to take, since the Ordinance of 1787 
made no discrimination. But it was a view that necessarily 
brought on a collision with the Reserve settlers. The erec- 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 367 

tion of Jefferson County coincided with the arrival of settlers 
on the soil, and so became the occasion of the collision. 

General Parsons caused his deed of the Salt-springs Tract 
to be recorded at Marietta. Some of those who bought parts 
of the tract from him did the same. A few deeds were also 
recorded at Steubenville, the county seat of Jefferson County. 
But the people of the Reserve, with practical unanimity, de- 
nied the Territorial jurisdiction. The Jefferson County au- 
thorities sent an agent to inquire into the matter of taxation ; 
but the settlers laughed at him, and he returned to Steuben- 
ville no richer and no wiser than he came. The laughter 
showered upon the unfortunate tax-gatherer signified much 
more than the familiar disposition to avoid the payment of 
taxes. No further attempt was made to extend the Territo- 
rial jurisdiction over the Reserve until some very important 
legislation had been enacted in Philadelphia and in Hartford. 

The settlers resisted the authority of the Territory, and so 
of the United States, in the name of the State of Connecticut. 
Ostensibly, they were defending the right and dignity of that 
ancient commonwealth. But the State herself was indiffer- 
ent to the controversy. She even refused to assert her juris- 
diction when the Land Company importuned her to do so. 
Having divested herself of the territory, she apparently took 
little further interest in the subject. 

On January 27, 1797, only a few days after the first 
party of surveyors returned from the Reserve, the stock- 
holders of the company, at a meeting held in Hartford, in- 
structed the directors and trustees to make application to 
the General Assembly at the next ensuing session for an 
act erecting the Western Reserve into an entire and distinct 
county, " with proper and suitable laws, to regulate the in- 
ternal policy of said territory for a limited term of time, and 
the same to be administered at the sole expense of proprie- 
tors.'" Presumably, such an application was made, but the 

' The quotations from the proceedings of the stock-holders arc made from 
The Book of Drafts, in the records of Trumbull County, Ohio. 



368 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

General Assembly took no such action. It did not care to 
repeat, upon a more distant field, the Westmoreland experi- 
ment. This was the first of several distinct calls that the 
Land Company made upon the State to exercise the juridical 
and territorial right that she had formally laid aside. 

In October, 1797, the stock-holders gave the directors and 
trustees " full authority to pursue such measures as they 
deemed best calculated to procure legal and practical govern- 
ment over the territory belonging to the company." A new 
tack was now taken. The Connecticut Assembly passed an 
act authorizing its Senators in Congress to execute, in the 
name of the State, a deed releasing to the United States the 
jurisdiction of the Reserve. On January 12, 1798, Mr. Tracy 
moved, in the Senate, the appointment of a committee to take 
into consideration the acceptance of such a cession. At the 
next session of Congress the Senate, after mature deliberation, 
passed a bill to that effect, but the House of Representatives 
postponed it, and the measure fell. 

Meantime the company was calling for help more and 
more loudly. On January 22, 1798, the stock-holders voted 
that if Congress should agree to accept from the company 
their juridical right to the Western Reserve, then application 
should be made to Governor St. Clair to erect all that part of 
it to which the Indian title had been extinguished into an 
entire and distinct county in the Northwest Territory. At 
the next meeting, held in October, 1798, the stock-holders in- 
structed the directors to appoint an agent " to proceed on 
Philadelphia " to facilitate the acceptance of the jurisdiction. 
They voted, also, that in case the application to Congress 
should fail, then the directors should " pursue the petition of 
the company now pending before the General Assembly of 
the State, at their next session." In May, 1799, the stock- 
holders spoke again, and more distinctly than ever. 

" Voted, that the trustees and directors be authorized, and 
they are hereby requested, to make out and lay before the 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 369 

General Assembly of the State, now in session, a statement in 
writing of the measures taken by the Company before Con- 
gress at their last session in endeavoring to obtain an accept- 
ance of the cession of the jurisdiction of the Western Reserve. 
Also a statement of the sums of money actually expended by 
the Company in surveying lands, cutting roads, and erecting 
mills. Also the probable sums disbursed by individuals in 
making improvements in different parts of the Reserve the last 
and present years. Also state the difficulty of making any 
sales of the lands by the proprietors and enforcing a payment 
of sales already made arising from the want of government in 
and over the territory." 

And at still another meeting the directors were instructed 
to represent to the assembly the ill success of the application 
to Congress, the continued embarrassed situation of the stock- 
holders' property, the difificulty of raising money out of the 
land, and to pray the assembly to extend government over 
the territory until Congress should accept the cession of juris- 
diction, or to grant such other relief as they should think 
proper. 

Nothing could mark the desperation of the Land Com- 
pany's situation more distinctly than these votes. The stock- 
holders fly from the assembly to Congress, and from Con- 
gress to the assembly. Men desiring Western lands would 
hesitate to purchase in a district where there was no govern- 
ment, and particularly where the right to govern was in dis- 
pute. Men owning lands would hesitate to sell so long as 
payment could not be enforced. But all this time there was 
an authority standing ready to extend itself, at a moment's 
notice, over the Reserve. All that the Land Company and 
the settlers had to do was to let their wants be known to 
Governor St. Clair. Connecticut did not restrain them in 
the least. Perhaps the company and the settlers would have 
applied to him for relief had it not been for a question that 
is never for a moment admitted into the minutes of the com- 
pany's proceedings, but that the man attempting to write the 
24 



3/0 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

civil history of the Western Reserve must bring into the fore- 
ground, viz., the insuf^ciency of the Connecticut title to the 
soil and its relation to the jurisdiction. 

The history of the Northwestern cessions need not be 
again recited at length. But it is important to observe that 
the validity of all the Western land-claims had been by many 
denied ; that the lands ceded and the lands reserved by Con- 
necticut had all been claimed by New York and Virginia; 
that the acceptance of the partial cession made by Connecti- 
cut in 1786 had been strongly opposed in Congress, on the 
ground that such acceptance would be a guarantee of the reser- 
vation ; and that, in consequence, a cloud rested on the title 
to the Reserve. The situation was perfectly understood at 
the time the sale and purchase were made. The State only 
quit-claimed to the Land Company her own right and title 
to the territory, and received a consideration from the com- 
pany that was graduated with reference to the title. The 
change of owners excited new doubts rather than allayed old 
ones. The survey of the lands, the inflow of population, and 
the attempt to embrace the Reserve in the Territorial jurisdic- 
tion kept the subject before men's minds. Thus, the original 
doubt as to the title tended to cast a shadow on every land- 
transaction within the district. These facts do not appear in 
the minutes of the stock-holders' meetings ; but the question 
whether the company could make valid titles caused as much 
difficulty in making sales of lands as the want of a govern- 
ment to protect society and to enforce contracts. Further- 
more, Connecticut held the soil before 1795 by the same title 
that she held the jurisdiction ; and if the jurisdiction was in 
the United States after 1786, then the ownership of the soil 
was there too. Accordingly, the extension of the Territorial 
Government over the Reserve was a real, though not an in- 
tended, menace to the Connecticut title that the company 
and the settlers alike could do no less than resist. The com- 
pany's situation was, therefore, much^more serious than the 
resolutions quoted above imply. It needed to have the ques- 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 371 

tion of ownership settled as much as it needed to have a gov- 
ernment established. 

What the terms of the Senate bill of 1798-99 were is 
known only inferentially. The title shows that it authorized 
the acceptance by the United States, from the State of Con- 
necticut, of a cession of the jurisdiction over the Reserve. It 
must also have contained a cession by the United States to 
the State of Connecticut of the soil of the Reserve. Without 
such a guarantee, the position of the company as to titles 
would have been weakened rather than strengthened, and 
perhaps subverted altogether. 

On February 18, 1800, Mr. Brace, of Connecticut, offered 
in the House of Representatives a resolution creating a com- 
mittee to take into consideration the expediency of accepting 
the cession of jurisdiction. A few days later such a com- 
mittee was appointed, with John Marshall, of Virginia, soon 
afterward made Chief Justice of the United States, as chair- 
man. Marshall's report covers five of the ample pages of the 
" State Papers." * More than three-fourths of this report is a 
mere transcript of one made to the Senate the year before by 
Mr. Reed ; but, since it had Marshall's approval and was the 
basis of the subsequent action of Congress, it is the most 
authoritative paper ever devoted to the discussion of Con- 
necticut's title to the lands within her charter-limits west of 
Pennsylvania. It recites the history of the charters from 1606 
to 1664; considers the controversy between England and 
France, closed by the treaty of 1763 ; mentions the Quebec 
Act; recounts the boundary-disputes between Connecticut and 
New York, and Connecticut and Pennsylvania ; relates the 
history of the cessions, followed by the acts of the Connecticut 
Legislature pertaining to the Reserve, and the sale to the Land 
Company. The company have paid $100,000 of interest on 
the purchase-money, and expended $80,000 on the survey and 
various improvements. Thirty-five settlements have been 

' Public Lands, I., 94. 



3/2 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

made, containing a population of about a thousand people. 
The dilemma of the company is stated in a single sentence: 
*' As the purchasers of the land commonly called the Connecti- 
cut Reserve hold their title under the State of Connecticut, 
they cannot submit to the government established by the 
United States in the Northwestern Territory, without endan- 
gering their titles, and the jurisdiction of Connecticut could 
not be extended over them without much inconvenience." 
The report closes with the declaration that, in the opinion of 
the committee, the offer of the jurisdiction ought to be ac- 
cepted on the terms and conditions specified in the accom- 
panying bill. The aim throughout is to establish the validity 
of the Connecticut title. Connecticut is seized of the juris- 
diction ; she could set up a government on the Reserve if she 
chose to do so; it is far better to merge the jurisdiction in 
the Northwest Territory — such is the logic of the report. 

The bill as passed authorized the President, in the name 
and in behalf of the United States, to execute and deliver to 
the Governor of Connecticut letters patent whereby the right, 
title, interest, and estate of the United States to the territory 
commonly called the Western Reserve should be released and 
conveyed to the said Governor and his successors in office, 
" for the purpose of quieting the grantees and purchasers under 
said State of Connecticut, and confirming their titles to the 
soil of the said tract of land ; " provided, Jiowever, that Con- 
necticut should, within eight months from the passage of the 
act, by a legislative act, renounce forever all territorial and 
jurisdictional claims whatever to the soil and jurisdiction of 
any and all lands lying westward, southwestward, and north- 
westward of the eastern line of the State of New York, as 
ascertained by the agreement of 1733 between New York 
and Connecticut, excepting from such renunciation only the 
Western Reserve ; provided, fiirtJier, that the State of Con- 
necticut should also, within eight months, execute and de- 
liver to the President a deed expressly releasing to the United 
States the jurisdictional claim of the said State of Connecti- 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 3.73 

cut to the Reserve ; provided^ also, that this act shall not " be 
construed to pledge the United States for extinguishment of 
the Indian title to the said lands, or further than merely to pass 
the title of the United States thereto." Another proviso 
was added, on motion of Mr. Gallatin, that the act should 
not be construed in any manner to question the conclusive 
settlement of the dispute between Pennsylvania and Con- 
necticut by the Federal Court at Trenton in 1782. 

This bill was vehemently opposed in both Houses of Con- 
gress. Mr. Cooper, of New York, first moved to postpone it 
until the next session, and then to amend it in such a way as 
to make it obnoxious to the Pennsylvania members. Mr. 
Elmendorf, of the same State, also moved an amendment in 
the spirit of obstruction. Mr. Marshall made a lengthy speech 
in favor of the bill and against the Elmendorf amendment. 
Mr. Randolph and Mr. Nicholas, both of Virginia, made long 
speeches against the "principle of the bill." Elmendorf ar- 
gued at great length against the validity of Connecticut's 
claim to the lands, and Mr. Bird, of New York, and Mr. Ran- 
dolph followed on the same side. The bill passed the House 
— ayes, 54 ; nays, 36. In the Senate an amendment to make 
the execution and delivery of the letters patent contingent 
upon a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States 
affirming the validity of the Connecticut claim, was lost — ayes, 
10; nays, 15. The bill passed the Senate — ayes, 15; nays, 
10. President Adams's approval, given April 28, 1800, made 
the bill a law. 

The questions arise : " Why such a determined opposition 
to this measure ? " '* What objection could be urged against 
a bill that seems so reasonable and so necessary?" Not a 
scrap of the speeches made on either side has been preserved, 
and the entries in the " Journals " and the " Annals " are al- 
ways brief, and often obscure. At the same time, there is no 
difficulty in reading between the lines the general grounds 
of objection. 

There was no reason why the surrender and acceptance 



374 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

of the jurisdiction should provoke opposition ; nor did it. It 
was the release and conveyance to Connecticut of the right, 
title, interest, and estate of the United States that made all 
the trouble. Marshall's report was written to establish the 
validity of Connecticut's claim, and the bill proposed, virt- 
ually, to guarantee that claim. It could be argued, in oppo- 
sition, that the lands in question belonged to the United 
States: (i) Because the British Crown had ceded them in 
1783 ; or (2) because New York had ceded them in 1781 ; or 
(3) because Virginia had ceded them in 1784. A certain 
temptation to deny the Connecticut title, and to hold that the 
lands were a part of the national domain, arose from their 
commercial value. Then an objector might argue that, since 
the cession and the reservation of 1786 were final, and since 
both the soil and the jurisdiction belonged to Connecticut, 
Congress had nothing to do with the matter ; and that the 
State, the Land Company, and the settlers must get out of 
their troubles the best way they could. It could also be ob- 
jected that the passing of a title from the Nation to the State 
was unnecessary, because if Connecticut owned the jurisdic- 
tion she also owned the soil. Marshall's report and the ac- 
companying bill were not logically consistent. The more 
cogently Marshall reasoned to show the validity of the Con- 
necticut title, the more conclusively did he prove that it was 
unnecessary for Congress to release the soil. If the United 
States owned the soil she also owned the jurisdiction, and 
if Connecticut owned the jurisdiction she, or those to whom 
she had released it, also owned the soil. The Land Com- 
pany's resolutions speak of surrendering the jurisdiction and 
of the establishment of government ; the quieting act pro- 
poses to surrender the title of the United States to the soil 
on certain terms and conditions, one of which is the sur- 
render of jurisdiction. Moreover, Congress, by releasing its 
right and title to Connecticut, would, by implication, deny 
that either New York or Virginia had ceded the Reserve, and 
so deny that either of them had any right or title to it pre- 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 375 

vious to its cession. Furthermore, since New York's title was 
later than Connecticut's, this, in effect, would be holding that 
New York's whole Western claim, from the Lakes to the 
Cumberland Mountains, had been baseless. New York and 
Virginia had now no more pecuniary interest in the question 
at issue than any other States, but they would naturally re- 
sent any action on the part of Congress that threatened to 
invalidate their historical position. A denial of New York's 
claim to the Western Reserve would be a denial of her claim 
to all the Western lands whatsoever. Moreover, such denial 
would really extend as far east as the Delaware River, for 
that river was the eastern boundary of the original Western 
claims of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Such denials could 
indeed no longer have any practical bearing, since these points 
of controversy had been adjusted, but it would still be a re- 
flection upon New York's original title that her representa- 
tives would be apt to repel. Then the guarantee of the Re- 
serve to Connecticut would be very galling to Virginia; for 
the Old Congress had stubbornly refused to guarantee her 
claims southeast of the Ohio River. And, finally, the bill was 
based on a new principle ; hitherto Congress had never, in a 
single instance, strengthened the Western title of a State 
growing out of the old charters. 

Within the compass of the foregoing remarks, no doubt, 
the objections to the quieting act of 1800 lay.' 



' The quieting act had been anticipated. On the day that Congress accepted 
the Connecticut cession, Mr. Wilson, of Pennsylvania, made a motion, that was 
lost, declaring that Congress could not accept it, since to do so would be a ratifi- 
cation of the part not ceded but reserved, and closing with this resolution, which 
once more stirs the embers of old controversies : 

^^ Resolved, . . . that when the State of Connecticut shall cede and re- 
lease to the United States, and to the States of New York and Pennsylvania, 
respectively, all the claim of the said State of Connecticut to jurisdiction and 
property of territory westward of the eastern boundary of the State of New York, 
the United States in Congress assembled will thereupon grant, release and con- 
firm to the State of Connecticut, the property, but not the jurisdiction of the ter- 
ritory and tract or land described as follows " [then describing the reservation]. 



376 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The geographical distribution of the opposition to this 
act throws light upon its animus. The attacks upon the bill 
in the House of Representatives were made by Bird, Cooper, 
and Elmendorf, of New York ; and by John Nicholas and 
John Randolph, of Virginia. Of New York's ten votes eight 
were thrown against the bill, and none for it. Of the twelve 
Virginia votes the bill received but three. Pennsylvania gave 
ten of her twelve votes for the bill, and none against it. But 
Pennsylvania had never been a claimant State, and had no 
State dignity to uphold. It might, perhaps, be expected that 
Massachusetts would be disinclined to see the seal of con- 
gressional approval set on the Connecticut claim, but she had 
never claimed the Reserve, or any part of it, as both the 
other States had done. Many of her people were seeking 
homes on the Reserve, some members of the Land Company 
were Massachusetts men, and she would naturally be in- 
fluenced more or less by good neighborhood. Massachusetts 
gave fourteen votes for the bill. In the Senate, not a vote 
for the measure came from either New York or Virginia. 

Finally, it is not impossible that there was a partisan 
animus in the opposition ; Connecticut was strongly Federalist 
in politics, while most of the opposition belonged to the Jef- 
ferson ian school. 

The General Assembly of Connecticut promptly complied 
with the conditions of the quieting act. It passed an act re- 
nouncing the State's claims to all lands lying west of the 
boundary-line between Connecticut and New York as agreed 
upon in 1733, except the Reserve, both soil and jurisdiction, 
and authorizing and directing the Governor of the State to 
execute and deliver to the President of the United States a 
deed conveying to the United States the jurisdiction of the 
Reserve. On May 30, 1800, Governor Trumbull performed 
this duty, and soon after President Adams executed and de- 
livered letters patent releasing all the right, claim, and inter- 
est of the United States to the soil. The renunciation of 
the State's claim to all lands west of the line of 1733, except 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 3// 

the Reserve, was a surrender of the " Gore " to New York, 
and it brought to a sudden end the suits that holders of the 
Ward and Halsey titles had brought in the Circuit Court of 
the United States to eject the occupants with New York 
titles. Such was the solution of the last puzzle growing out 
of the from-sea-to-sea charters. 

The longer one looks into the situation of the Connecti- 
cut Land Company from 1797 to 1800 the more trying he 
sees it to have been. The interest was running on their obli- 
gations, but they could not effect sales, or could effect but 
few. Then, when the subject was finally brought forward in 
Congress, there was abundant opportunity for constitutional 
metaphysics and legal hair-splitting. Logically inconsistent 
as were the two principles of the quieting act, and reversing 
as that act did the policy of the Old Congress, it gave the 
State of Connecticut, the Land Company, and the people of 
the Reserve, a happy escape from difficulties that were already 
serious, and that threatened grave disaster. The act is a good 
example of the Anglo-Saxon habit of disregarding logical re- 
finements and legal technicalities and of pursuing the direct 
common-sense road to a just end. It could have been suc- 
cessfully defended on broad grounds of public policy. The 
foremost champion of the act was John Marshall; and when 
we recall that he was a Virginian, and that he had great in- 
fluence in the House of Representatives, particularly on legal 
questions, it does not seem too much to say that the Western 
Reserve is indebted to him for the institution of civil govern- 
ment and for a perfect system of land-titles. At all events, 
Marshall's name is connected with its history in an interest- 
ing way. 

On July 10, 1800, Governor St. Clair issued a proclama- 
tion constituting the whole Reserve a county, with the name 
of Trumbull. Rather, he bounded the county on the north 
by the parallel 42° 2' north latitude, which was carrying it 
some distance beyond the international boundary-line and in- 
vading the British dominions. Next, the Governor appointed 



378 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

a probate judge and justices of the quorum for the new coun- 
ty. The first Court of Quarter Sessions sat at Warren, the 
county seat, on the fourth Monday of August, 1800, at which 
time the county was organized. The first election was held 
at the same place on the second Tuesday of October, when 
the electors of the county, by thirty-eight votes out of forty- 
two, chose a representative in the Territorial Legislature. 
Civil government on the Western Reserve was at last estab- 
lished. The first act in the long series leading to its estab- 
lishment was performed at Whitehall, in 1662, by the third 
Stuart ; the last act, at Warren, O., in i8cK), by the forty-two 
backwoods electors. 

The development of the Western Reserve has been as grati- 
fying as its beginning was discouraging. Its area is about five 
thousand square miles of territory, or a little larger than Con- 
necticut ; in population it had nearly reached the Mother State 
in 1880, and since that time has gone beyond her. No other 
five thousand square miles of territory in the United States, 
lying in a body outside of New England, ever had, to begin 
with, so pure a New England population. No similar territory 
west of the Alleghany Mountains has so impressed the brain 
and conscience of the country. No other district gives so fine 
an opportunity to study the development of the New Eng- 
land character under Western conditions. In externals, the 
colonists, a majority of whom came from Connecticut, repro- 
duced New England in Northeastern Ohio, It has long been 
remarked that, in some respects, the Western Reserve is 
more New England than New England herself. Mr. John 
Fiske found the illustration that he wanted of an early feat- 
ure of English life in Euclid Avenue, Cleveland.^ There is 
also an undeniable continuity of intellectual and moral life. 
But the southern shore of Lake Erie is not the northern 

1 American Political Ideas, 22. 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 3/9 

shore of Long Island Sound ; New Connecticut is not a re- 
production of Old Connecticut. 

The position of Connecticut in history is a most honor- 
able one, quite disproportionate to her territorial area, or to the 
numbers of her population. Far should it be from a man of 
Connecticut descent to speak slightingly of the commonwealth 
of his fathers. But the Connecticut of 1796 was dominated 
by class influences and ideas ; a heavy mass of political and 
religious dogma rested upon society ; an inveterate conserva- 
tism fettered both the actions and the thoughts of men. The 
church and the town were but different sides of the same 
thing. The town was a close corporation ; and the man who, 
did not belong to it, either by birth or formal naturalization, 
could be a resident of it only on sufferance. The yearly in- 
auguration of the governor is said to have been " an occasion 
of solemn import and unusual magnificence." Connecticut 
Federalism was the most ironclad variety anywhere to be 
found, unless in Delaware. In 1804 the General Court im- 
peached several justices of the peace who had the temerity to 
attend a Jeffersonian convention in New Haven. Mechanics 
were accounted " vulgar ; " farming was the " respectable " 
calling ; " leading men " had an extraordinary influence ; and 
"old families" were the pride and the weakness of their re- 
spective localities. The militia captain and the deacon were 
local magnates. Congregationalism was an established re- 
ligioii; and how restive the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the 
Sandemanians, the Methodists, and other dissenting churches, 
and men of no church, were, under its reign, a glance through 
a file of old Connecticut newspapers will show. For years 
the General Assembly refused to charter Episcopalian and 
Methodist colleges. President Ouincy paints this picture of 
a Sabbath morning in Andover, Mass. : 

" The whole space before the meeting house was filled with 
a waiting, respectful, and expecting multitude. At the mo- 
ment of service, the pastor issued from his mansion, with Bible 



38o THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

and manuscript sermon under his arm, with his wife leaning 
on one arm, flanked by his negro man on his side, as his wife 
was by her negro woman, the little negroes being distributed, 
according to their sex, by the side of their respective parents. 
Then followed every other member of the family according to 
age and rank, making often, with family visitants, somewhat 
of a formidable procession. As soon as it appeared, the con- 
gregation, as if led by one spirit, began to move towards the 
door of the church, and before the procession reached it all 
were in their places. As soon as the pastor entered, the whole 
congregation rose and stood until he was in the pulpit and his 
family were seated. At the close of the service the congrega- 
tion stood until he and his family had left the church. Fore- 
noon and afternoon the same course of proceeding was had." ' 

Of course, such magnificence as this was unusual ; but the 
passage well marks the awful consequence with which the 
New England mind, in that period, invested the parson. All 
the conservatism of Connecticut rallied around the venerable 
charter of 1662, holding it as sacred as the Trojans ever held 
the Palladium ; and the party which broke down the charter 
and set up the constitution of 1818 were called "The Tolera- 
tionists." 

It is plain that at the close of the last century Connecti- 
cut had shelled over. While a desire to break through this 
shell was the motive that sent many a man and family to the 
West, the whole emigration still brought much of the old 
conservatism and dogma to Ohio. But these people had not 
been long in their new home before they began to feel the 
throbbings of a new life, and they soon began to do things 
that in their old home they would never have dreamed of 
doing. As early as 1832, President Storrs and his assistants 
in the faculty of Western Reserve College were preaching 
and lecturing against slavery, at Hudson. Those sermons 
and lectures were the real beginning of anti-slavery propa- 

' North American Review, No. CCL., 13, 14. 



THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE. 381 

gandism in Northern Ohio. How much tlie anti-slavery men 
of the East counted upon Storrs's co-operation is shown by 
Whittier's pathetic elegy written on Storrs's too early death. 
Early in its history, the name of Oberlin became synonymous 
with Abolitionism throughout the country. Giddings upheld 
anti-slavery principles in Congress when there was none but 
John Ouincy Adams to support him. In the decade 1840-50, 
the Reserve had a more definite anti-slavery character than 
any other equal extent of territory in the United States. A 
liberalizing tendency may also be traced in religion. The 
Calvinistic rigidity of the churches was softened. The new 
theology sounded out from Oberlin, while that seat of learn- 
ing was still hidden in the woods, was even more hateful to 
New England orthodoxy than the new theology afterwards 
sounded out from Andover. Dissenting bodies, as they would 
have been in Connecticut — Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples 
— gained a foothold and multiplied in numbers. And the 
same in education. Men on whom the awful shadow of Yale 
and Harvard had fallen, begun at Oberlin the first collegiate 
co-education experiment tried in the world. Both at Oberlin 
and at Hudson the finality of the old educational rubrics was 
denied, and new studies were introduced into the curricula. 
The common school, the academy, the college, the church, 
the newspaper, the debating society, and the platform stimu- 
lated the mental and moral life of the people to the utmost. 
The Reserve came to have a character all its own. Men 
with " new ideas " hastened to it as to a seed-bed. Men with 
" reforms " and " causes " to advocate found a willing audi- 
ence. Later years have brought new elements ; but to-day 
the mail clerks on the Lake Shore Railroad are compelled to 
quicken their motions the moment they enter its borders from 
either east or west. Adapting the language that General J. 
D. Cox once used, there are in Northeastern Ohio the straits 
in a great moral Gulf Stream. Between Lake Eric and the 
Ohio, from Pittsburg to Chicago, has been compressed a hu- 
man tide fed by the overflow of New England, the Middle 



382 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

States, and Europe. Beyond Lake Michigan this stream 
'widens out, fan-like, northwest and southwest, from Mani- 
toba to the Arkansas River ; and breaks over the ridges of 
the Rocky Mountains in streams that reach. the Pacific Coast. 
Wherever it has gone this stream has carried the thought- 
seeds gathered from the banks of the straits through which 
it rushes,' But the Reserve has been conservative as well 
as radical. Since Elisha Whittlesey took his seat, in 1828, 
the Nineteenth Ohio Congressional District has been repre- 
sented in Congress by but six men. In 1872 the greatest of 
these six men, in addressing the convention that had just 
nominated him for the sixth time, said for more than half a 
century the people of the district had held and expressed 
bold and independent opinions on all public questions, yet 
they had never asked their representative to be the mere echo 
of the party voice. They supported and defended their rep- 
resentative in maintaining an independent position in the 
National Legislature, and whenever he acted with honest and 
intelligent courage in the interests of truth, they generously 
sustained him even when he differed from them in minor 
matters of opinion and policy.' The old charge of " 'isms " 
and " extravagance " cannot be wholly denied ; but, on the 
whole, the plain people, while throwing much of the New 
England ballast overboard, and crowding their canvas, have 
held the rudder so true as to avoid dangerous extremes. The 
historian finds small occasion to defend them on the ground 
that somev/hat of folly and fanaticism always attend a peo- 
ple's emancipation. 

' The Oberlin Jubilee, 290, 291. 
' Garfield : Works, II., 30, 31. 



XX. 

NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 

Charles Sumner once gathered, in a celebrated article, 
some of the happier prophecies concerning America.' He 
might have made a similar collection of the less happy ones, 
that would have been quite as instructive and more curious. 
Had he done so, he might have come upon some of the fol- 
lowing about the Great West. 

Few of Dr. Franklin's contemporaries had his grasp of the 
Western question. But even Franklin's prescience was not 
equal to his subject. He saw that east of the Mississippi 
and south of the Lake and the St, Lawrence there was room 
enough for a hundred millions of people; "but this must 
take some centuries to fulfil." When the question of fixing 
a permanent seat of government was under discussion in 
Congress, in 1789, much was said of the centre of population. 
Mr. Goodhue, of Massachusetts, said he believed this centre 
"would not vary considerably for ages yet to come, because 
he supposed it would constantly increase more toward the 
Eastern and manufacturing States than toward the Southern 
and agricultural ones," not taking the West into account at 
all. At that time the centre of population was twenty-five 
miles east of Baltimore ; and little did the men who took 
part in that debate dream that- it would move steadily west- 
ward along the thirty-ninth parallel at the nearly uniform 
rate of five miles a year, and that, in a century, it would be 
much nearer the Mississippi River than the Alleghany Moun- 
tains. Fisher Ames said, in the same debate, that when "the 

' Prophetic Voices about America, the Atlantic Monthly, XX., 275. 



384 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

almost immeasurable wilderness " of the Ohio would be set- 
tled, or how it could possibly be governed, was " past calcu- 
lation ; " that it was " romantic " to make the decision of the 
capital question turn upon that circumstance; and that it 
would be near a century before the people of that region 
would be considerable. In 1825 Mr. Dickerson, of New Jer- 
sey, discussing in the Senate the occupation of Oregon, said 
the territory could never be a State in the Union, and went 
into an elaborate calculation to prove the physical impossi- 
bility of a man's representing the Valley of the Columbia in 
Congress, since he would be the whole year, travelling at the 
rate of thirty miles a day, making the overland journey to 
Washington and back ; and afifirmed that it would be more 
expeditious to double Cape Horn or to pass through the 
Arctic Ocean. " It is true," he added, " this passage is not yet 
discovered, except upon our maps, but it will be as soon as 
Oregon shall be a State." If any man had a large conception 
of the West, it was Henry Clay, yet Mr. Clay said, in 1832 : 
" We may anticipate that long, if not centuries, after the 
present day, the representatives of our children's children 
may be deliberating in the halls of Congress on laws relating 
to the public lands." Even men who have lived in an age 
of wonders often think that wonders will cease with them. 
Defending the Treaty of Washington, in 1846, Daniel Webster 
said : " We have heard a vast deal lately of the commercial 
value of the River Columbia and its occupation ; but I will un- 
dertake to say that for all purposes of human use the St. Johns 
is worth a hundred times as much as the Columbia is, or ever 
will be." We wonder at such feeble prophecies; but, although 
we have seen the progress that so far outran the highest antic- 
ipations of our fathers — a progress each decade of which has 
been a new morn risen on high noon — ^our own visions of the 
next century may fall as far short of the reality. The possibil- 
ities of the United States, and particularly of the Great West, 
under a free and stable government, in an age of stupendous ma- 
terial development, defied the forecast of the wisest statesmen. 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 



385 



Table Showing the Population of the Northwestern States, the Per 
Cent, of Increase, their Rank among the States of the Union, 
AND the Number of People to a Square Mile, for the Census 
Years i8oo-i8go. 



1800. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

1810. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

' 1820. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

1830. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile . . . 

1840. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

1850. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

i860. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

1870. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

1 880. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile. . . 

i8go. 

Population 

Per cent, of increase 

Rank 

Number per square mile . . . 

21; 



Ohio. 



Indi- 
ana, 



Illinois. 



42,161 
17 



230,760 

408.6 

13 

S-7 



581,295 

151-9 

5 

14.3 



937i903 

61.3 

4 

23 



15191467 
62 

3 
37-3 



80,329 

30-3 

3 

48.6 



.339.5" 
18.1 

3 
57-4 



,665,260 

13.9 

3 

65.3 



,198,062 

19.9 

3 

78.S 

,672,318 

14.S 

4 

90.10 



24,520 
339-6 



197,178 
502.2 



343,031 

133 

13 

9.6 



685,866 

99.9 

10 

18. 1 



988,416 

44.1 

7 

27-5 



1,350,428 

36.6 

6 

37-6 



1,680,637 
24.4 

6 



1,978,301 
17.7 

. 6 
55-1 



2,192,404 

10.8 

8 

61.05 



12,282 



55,162 
349-1 



157,445 
185-4 



476,183 

202.4 

14 

8.5 



851,470 
78.8 



ii7ii.9Si 

lOI 

4 
30.6 



2.S39.891 
48.3 



3,077,871 
21. 1 



3,826,351 
24-3 

68.33 



Michi- 
gan. 



4,762 
25 



8,765 
84 
27 



31.639 

260.9 

27 

.6 



212,267 

570-9 
23 
3-7 



397.654 

87.3 

20 

6.9 



749.113 

88.3 
16 
13 



1,184,059 

58 

13 

20.6 



1,636,937 

38.2 

9 
28.5 



2,093, 

27.9 

9 
36.46 



Wiscon- 
sin. 



Total of 
five States. 



30,945 

30 
.6 



305,391 



775, Ka I 

154 

15 

14.2 



1,054,670 

35-9 

15 

19-3 



1,315,497 

24.7 

16 

24.2 



1,686,880 

28.2 

14 

30.98 



842,400 



1,470,018 



2,924,728 



4,523,260 



6,926,884 



11,206,668 



13,471.842 



Total, 
United 
States, 



5,308,483 



7,289,884 



9,633,822 



12,866,020 



23,191,867 



38,588,371 



50,155,783 



62,622,250 



386 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

In many lines of progress, the United States is the marvel 
of history, and the Old Northwest the marvel of the United 
States. No other extensive region of the globe ever devel- 
oped so rapidly in the first century of its history. It is con- 
sistent with the character of this work to take only a hurried 
glance at the subject. Population will first be mentioned. 

All the old divisions of the Union contributed to early 
Northwestern emigration, but not in equal measure. The 
Southern States, partly because they had fewer people to 
spare, and partly owing to their preference for the region 
south of the Ohio River, sent a smaller contingent beyond 
that stream than either the Middle States or New England. 
Moreover, much the larger part of the Southern emigration 
found homes in the southern parts of the States bordering 
on the Ohio River, while the Northern emigrants took posses- 
sion of the central and northern parts of those States, and of 
Michigan and Wisconsin altogether with slight exceptions. 
Still further, this Northern population has pressed more and 
more to the southward. In the second period, a large foreign 
emigration flowed into all of the five States. In 1880 Michi- 
gan had the largest number of British-American born people 
of any State in the Union, and in 1890 was second only to 
Massachusetts. Every one of the five States contains a very 
large German element, and more Scandinavians are found in 
Wisconsin and Minnesota than in any other States of the Union. 

The census-maps showing in five degrees of density the dis- 
tribution of the population of the United States at the census- 
years, illustrates in a striking manner what has been said in 
previous chapters concerning Western emigration and develop- 
ment, and particularly concerning the early superior advan- 
tages of the Ohio Valley as compared with the Lake region. 
In 1790 the island of color lying in Southwestern Pennsyl- 
vania extends its edge across the Ohio River below Pittsburg. 
Pin-points of color appear at the mouth of the Muskingum, 
on the Wabash, and in the Illinois. In 1800 the patches of 
color on the white surface have increased in size, and some 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 387 

of them have deepened. In 18 10 two-thirds of Ohio is 
colored, some of the color representing a population of from 
eighteen to forty-five and some from six to eighteen, but the 
larger part from two to six to the square mile. The Vin- 
cennes settlements extend to the Ohio River, and a belt of 
population appears along the eastern line of Indiana, one- 
half the length of the State. The Illinois population has 
extended over a larger area, both up and down the river and 
back from it. A stroke of color extends along the western 
side of the Detroit River, and specks appear at Mackinaw, at 
the Saut, at Green Bay, and at the mouth of the Wisconsin. 
In 1820 all of Ohio but the northwestern quarter, the southern 
third of Indiana, the southern fourth of Illinois, are settled 
more or less densely. A line of light color curves around the 
head of Lake Erie from the mouth of the Cuyahoga to the 
head of Lake St. Clair. In 1830 a white patch, of consider- 
able size, appears in Northwestern Ohio. The northern third 
of Indiana is white, with a colored island at Fort Wayne. In 
Illinois the settlements have extended north from the Ohio 
and east from the Mississippi, covering about one half the 
State. A red spot appears in the northwest, in the region 
of the lead mines, and crosses the boundary into Wisconsin. 
The Detroit settlements have grown in every direction, and a 
considerable population has appeared in the southwestern part 
of Michigan, extending into Northern Indiana. In 1840 not 
a white spot is left in Ohio. Nearly all Indiana and Illinois 
are colored. Michigan and Wisconsin are crossed by varying 
bands of color as high as the latitude of Port Huron and 
Madison. Beginnings have been made at the head of Lake 
Superior, and in the Valley of the St. Croix. From 1840 to 
1850 the northern frontier of these two States is slightly 
crowded back ; the density of the old population increases, and 
beginnings are made in the great lumber and mining regions of 
the north. Asimilar description will apply to i860 and to 1870. 
The map of 1880 shows the whole of the Northwest inhabited 
except a small interior island in the northern part of the Lower 



388 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Peninsula of Michigan, about one-half of the Upper Penin- 
sula, and a large tract in Northern Wisconsin. To each of 
these States is assigned an unsettled area of 10,200 square 
miles. Ten years later the lumbering and mining interests 
have practically obliterated the wilderness of Michigan, and 
reduced that of Wisconsin to less than half its former size. 

What statisticians call "the center of population" in the 
United States has moved steadily westward since 1790, hold- 
ing closely to parallel 39° N. latitude. In the decade 1850- 
60 it crossed the Ohio River, and, with a single exception, 
has since been on the north side of that stream. In i860 the 
center was twenty miles south of Chillicothe; in 1870 forty- 
eight miles east by north of Cincinnati; in 1880 eight miles 
west by south of that city, on the Kentucky side of the last 
great northward sweep of the river ; in 1890, twenty miles east 
of Columbus, Indiana. This center is now moving west by 
north, but it does not promise soon to cross the Mississippi. 

Nature adapted the Old Northwest to tillage to an ex- 
traordinary degree, and from the first agriculture has been 
the foremost industry. At the close of its first century 
no other States had such large per cents of their areas in 
farms as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Ohio then surpassed 
all the other States in the amount of capital invested in 
farms, and Illinois all others in farm products and in live 
stock. But Nature also adapted the region to manufactures 
and commerce, and the later Census Reports have shown 
great progress along those lines. In 1890 the number of 
persons over ten years of age employed in gainful pursuits 
was distributed as follows : — 



Agriculture, fisheries, and mining 

Professional services 

Domestic and personal services 

Trade and transportation 

Manufacturing and mechanical industries. 

Total 

Total in the United States 



1,766,696 

217,331 

914,720 

706,522 

1,081,028 



4,686,268 
22,735,661 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 389 

The total population of the five States was 13,471,842. 
The per cents of the male population employed in gainful 
pursuits were, Ohio, 75.47; Indiana, 74.42; Illinois, 76.52; 
Michigan, 77.97; Wisconsin, 75.25. The per cent of the 
whole country was 77.29. 

The increase of urban population, both absolute and rela- 
tive, which is such a striking fact in the later history of the 
country, has declared itself here in an unmistakable manner. 
Of the 448 cities that in 1890 contained 8,000 inhabitants or 
more, 102 were in the Old Northwest. Here also were found 
ten of the fifty leading cities of the country. Two of the 
States showed an absolute decrease in rural population in 
the previous decade, Ohio 13,274 and Illinois 66,741, while the 
three other States showed an aggregate gain of only 216;] $6. 
That is, the rural population of the region increased only 
136,141, while the urban population increased 2,109,033. 
The per cents of urban population in the several States were 
as follows: Ohio, 31.57; Indiana, 18.27; Illinois, 38.83; 
Michigan, 26.08; Wisconsin, 25.17; the Eleventh Census 
showed that the rural population had declined over great 
territorial areas. These are the per cents of areas showing 
losses of such population: Ohio, 61.39; Indiana, 47.39; 
Illinois, 65.73 ; Michigan, 26.61 ; Wisconsin, 18.25. 

The showing of wealth is equally remarkable. The grand 
total in 1890 was $15,041,000,000 to $65,037,000,000 for the 
whole country. In 1880 the corresponding figures were 
$10,230,000,000 and $46,642,000,000. The average per 
capita of wealth by States was, Ohio, $1,043 I Indiana, $956; 
Illinois, $1,324; Michigan, $i,OOi; Wisconsin, $1,087. 
The average per capita for the whole country was $1,036. 

In no line of progress has the human race made greater 
strides than in modes of travel and transportation ; and the 
whole sweep of this progress, from the most primitive to the 
most improved facilities, can be studied in the history of 
the Old Northwest. The first white men to enter it from the 
east did as the Indians had done, — follow the paths of the 



390 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

deer and the buffalo, called " streets " and " buffalo roads." 
They also followed the trails that the Indians had made, 
which, widened by the ax, became the " trace." Traders 
who followed the water borrowed of the Indian his canoe 
and of the Frenchman his bateau ; traders who kept to the 
land introduced the pack saddle and the train of pack horses. 
When the time came to move passengers in numbers and 
freight in quantities, the " keel boat " and the " ark " appeared 
on the rivers. The movement was chiefly westward, owing as 
well to the current of the streams as to the necessities of emi- 
gration. Boatmen who descended the rivers to New Orleans 
commonly broke up their craft and sold them for lumber; 
those who belonged on the Upper Ohio returning home by 
sea to Baltimore or Alexandria, and then by the road over 
the mountains ; those who belonged below the Muskingum 
marching northward in small companies through the wilder- 
ness by Natchez and Nashville. The first steamboat on the 
Ohio River appeared in i8ii and the first on the Lakes in 
i8l8. On land regular roads and wheeled vehicles succeeded 
to the trace, the saddle, and the pack-saddle, and then came 
canals and railroads. The first locomotive ran between 
Toledo, Ohio, and Adrian, Michigan, in 1S37. The first 
large transportation problem was to connect the Northern 
Lakes and the Mississippi River system, which was first 
accomplished by means of canals. Before the day for great 
east-and-west lines of communication came, the canal had 
given place to the railroad. The advances that have been 
made in communication, both in celerity and cheapness, 
almost defy belief. A century ago it cost ^I20 to move a 
ton of freight from Philadelphia to Pittsburg ; to-day it can 
be done for fewer cents. In 1788 Dr. Manasseh Cutler did 
twenty-nine days of hard traveling in reaching Marietta, 
Ohio, from Hamilton, Massachusetts ; now he could do it in 
fewer hours. At the time the announcement was welcomed 
that, on "January 11, 1794, a line of two keel boats with bullet- 
proof covers and port-holes, and provided with cannon and 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 391 

small arms, was established between Cincinnati and Pittsburg, 
each making a trip once in four weeks." In 1884 the trade 
of the Ohio was ;^8oo,ooo,ooo annually, and transportation 
on it had become the cheapest in the world, coal, coke, and 
other bulky articles being transported at the rate of one 
twentieth of a cent per mile. In 1896 the railroad mileage of 
the five States was reported as follows : Ohio, 8,726 ; In- 
diana, 6,373 ; Illinois, 10. 725; Michigan, 7,814; Wisconsin, 
6,166, making a total of 39,808 to the 182,776 miles of the 
whole country. 

The Ordinance of 1787 declared : " Religion, morality, and 
knowledge being necessary to good government and the hap- 
piness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall 
forever be encouraged." The Land Ordinance of 1785 had 
already provided that, wherever it operated, there should be 
reserved from sale the lot No. 16 of every township for the 
maintenance, within the township, of common schools. The 
Powers to the Board of Treasury, 1787, under which the sales 
of land to the Ohio Company and to Symmes were made, con- 
firmed the dedication of two years before, and also set apart 
two townships of land for a University within the contem- 
plated new State. When Ohio came into the Union, in 1803, 
lands equal to one thirty-sixth part of the surface of the whole 
State were set apart for common schools, and a third township 
was given for a second University. The same liberality was 
shown in dealing with the other four States, except that two 
townships of land was the ordinary dedication for a State 
University. Later grants have been made by Congress ex- 
pressly for education, while lands granted to States without 
any special object being designated have, in some cases, been 
devoted to this use. These educational land grants would 
form a prominent feature of any adequate history of educa- 
tion in the Old Northwest; here little beyond some summar- 
ies can be attempted. Unless otherwise stated, the date to 
which these summaries refer is 1884; since that time the 
statistics have not been collected and summarized, which is 



392 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

the less important because at that time the educational land 
grants had practically been exploited. 

The total amount of the grants made in accordance with 
the Ordinance of 1785 was 4,685,917 acres, of which 4,293,986 
acres was sold previous to the date mentioned above. In 
addition to these grants, one-half of the five per cent on the 
sales of public land in Illinois that was paid to the State, in 
accordance with the policy inaugurated in 1802, was devoted 
to schools, and in Wisconsin the whole of it was so devoted. 
The aggregate school funds of the five States arising from 
these two sources, principal and capitalized interest, was 
^16,418,477, and they yielded a yearly income of ^1,406,801. 
The National Government patented to these States, previous 
to the same year, under the legislation of Congress, 1 1,461,000 
acres of swamp lands, of which Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois 
appropriated the whole, and Michigan and Wisconsin one- 
half, to education. These lands produced educational funds 
amounting to $2,541,115. Again, 93,336 acres of saline lands 
dedicated to education produced $327,986. The university 
lands amounted to 345,716 acres, and yielded a total fund of 
$1,136,245, and an annual income of $78,801. The act of 
1862 appropriating lands for colleges of agriculture and 
mechanic arts gave the five States 1,980,000 acres of land 
and land scrip. In 1884, 1,800,862 acres of these lands had 
been sold, producing $1,864,514 and yielding an annual 
income of $118,172. On this basis Ohio, Indiana, and Illi- 
nois founded independent institutions of learning, while 
Michigan used the funds to strengthen an older State foun- 
dation, and Wisconsin used them to found an agricultural 
and mechanical department of her State University. In two 
cases, Ohio and Indiana, the funds that arose from the bounty 
of Congress were augmented by local public interest or by 
private beneficence. All of these institutions have profited 
by the later appropriations of money that Congress has made 
for sustaining agricultural experiment stations and for carry- 
ing on the regular work of instruction. Collectively, these 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 393 

institutions, in 1896, counted 257 members of faculties, 2,422 
students, and lands, buildings, and equipments valued at 
^3,532,000/ 

Here are educational endowments amounting to more than 
20,000,000 acres of wild land. The titles to these lands have 
always been vested in the State Legislatures. Their practical 
management has been marked by short sightedness and waste- 
fulness, greater or less. It is to be said, however, that, gener- 
ally speaking, the people were anxious to avail themselves 
of the endowments at an earl/ day ; that, at the time, nothing 
else was so plentiful in the West as wild lands ; that Congress 
had not yet learned to hedge the grants about with the re- 
strictions of later times; and that it was on this soil that the 
experiment was first tried. The annual incomes arising from 
these endowments are very small compared with the sums 
that the States raise by taxation for educational purposes, 
and they are constantly growing smaller; but they have 
served a good purpose in the past and will be of considerable 
value in years to come. 

It will not be impertinent to present in this connection 
some of the more important public school statistics of the 
Northwestern States ; those selected for this purpose refer to 
the year 1895-96. 

School population 5-18 years of age: — Ohio, 1,094,000; 
Indiana, 676,000; Illinois, 1,274,000; Michigan, 622,000; 
Wisconsin, 613,000; total, 4,274,000 ; the country, 20,865,377. 

Pupils enrolled in the common schools: — Ohio, 820,562; 
Indiana, 543,665 ; Illinois, 898,619; Michigan, 476,684; Wis- 
consin, 412,514; total, 3,152,034; the country, 14,379,118. 

Average daily attendance : Ohio, 597,925 ; Indiana, 
401,702; Illinois, 681,525 ; Michigan, 324,622; Wisconsin, 
271,000; total, 2,256,774; the country, 9,747,015. 

Common school expenditure: — Ohio, $12,329,919; In- 

' History and Management of Land Grants for Education in the Nortliwest 
Territory, George W. Knight, Papers of the American Historical Association, 
Vol. I. No. 3 ; Report of Commissioner of Education, 1895-96. 



394 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

diana, ^7,102,874; Illinois, $16,201,121 ; Michigan, $6,428,003 ; 
Wisconsin, $6,676,824; total, $48,738,741 ; the country, 
^184,463,780. 

Expended for common schools per capita of population : 
— Ohio, $3.20; Indiana, $3.10; Illinois, $3.55; Michigan, 
$2.87; Wisconsin, $3.25 ; the country, $2.61. 

In respect to education, the Northwest has been true to 
the spirit of the declaration of the great Ordinance ; schools 
and the means of education have been encouraged. The 
schoolmaster has been abroad* in the land, but that he still 
has plenty of work to do is shown by the statistics of illit- 
eracy in 1890. The number of white persons 10 years of 
age and upwards unable to read and write were as follows: 
Ohio, 132,244; Indiana, 94,334; Illinois, 140,219; Michigan, 
91,076; Wisconsin, 82,940. The lowest per cent of illiteracy 
was in Ohio 4.7, and the highest in Wisconsin, 6.6. 

The educational influence and results of opening the ter- 
ritory northwest of the Ohio River to civilization may be 
treated in a narrower and in a broader way. The nar- 
rower treatment would embrace school-lands, school-laws, and 
school-systems, with all that these imply ; the broader treat- 
ment would deal with the general forces and conditions that 
have wrought out the peculiar character of the Northwestern 
people, and, through them, have acted upon the national life. 
But no better example of the broadening and liberalizing in- 
fluence of the Northwest can be given than that furnished by 
the history of education in the specific sense. Here, as else- 
where, it has much crudeness and shallowness to answer for. 
The "fresh-water college" and the American "university" 
have had a rank growth. Perhaps, too, the Northwest has 
not always looked with sufficient reverence upon the old edu- 
cational rubrics. But if she had not been free from an undue 
conservatism, she would never have done what she has done 
for education, either directly at home or by reaction upon the 
East. The best contributions of the five States to educational 
progress are these : The flexibility of their educational sys- 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 395 

terns, and their adaptation to existing conditions ; the extent 
to which they hav^e carried the pubHc-school superintendency; 
the prominence that they have accorded to the State Univer- 
sity; the range and scope that they have given to the prin- 
ciple of election in higher education ; the measurable adjust- 
ment of the high school to the college ; the readiness with 
which the coeducation of the sexes has been taken up and de- 
veloped ; and the faith, energy, and enthusiasm of teachers. 
We have heard a great deal about what the East has done for 
the West, as respects education and other matters ; the time 
has come for drawing attention to what the West has done for 
the East. Mention may be made of coeducation. At the 
close of the first century of history, or in 1888, the five States 
had 95 institutions of higher learning, of which 68 admitted 
women freely to their halls. Six of the 27 non-coeducational 
institutions were Catholic and 21 Protestant. The New 
Northwest has followed the example of her older sister: in 
the States of Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, 
California, and Oregon, at the date last given, there were 41 
coeducational colleges and universities to 17 of the old type. 
Still more, throughout the whole Western country the 
strongest institutions throw open their doors to women on 
the same terms as to men. 

The Ordinance of 1787 declared religion as well as 
morality and knowledge to be necessary to good government 
and the happiness of mankind ; but, naturally enough, gov- 
ernment. National or State, could do less towards giving this 
part of the declaration practical effect. The Powers to the 
Board of Treasury set apart lot No. 29 in every township or 
fractional part of a township within the tracts sold to the 
Ohio Company and to Symmes perpetually for the purposes 
of religion. The example thus set the Government never 
repeated, but the Ohio Legislature took prompt measures to 
see that the lands so dedicated, something less than 40,000 
acres in total quantity, were duly applied to the intended 
object. The proceeds of these " ministerial lands," as they 



596 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



are now called, whether the lands have been sold or leased, 
are but a pitiful sum in comparison with the total cost of 
maintaining religion within the extensive tracts of country to 
which they apply, and scarcely more than a sufficient com- 
pensation for doing the business that they necessarily entail 
upon the local and State authorities. Religion, however, has 
not suffered because government has done less for it than for 
schools and education. The number of church organizations 
(i),.the value of church property (2), and the number of com- 
municants within the five States (3), in 1890 were as follows: 



Illinois 

Indiana. ..... 

Michigan .... 

Ohio 

Wisconsin . . . 

Total 



(I) 
8,296 
6,480 
4.79^ 
9,384 
3>726 



32,384 



(2) 
1^39,715,245 
18,671,131 
18,682,291 
42,159,762 
14,525,841 



$133,854,270 



(3) 
1,203,588 
693,861 

569,304 
1,216,469 

556,483 



4,239,704 



The influence of the country beyond the Alleghany Moun- 
tains on the population that occupies it, its reaction on the 
Atlantic Plain, and its effect on the national life, character, and 
government are themes demanding fuller investigation than 
they have ever received. Here originated many of the crude 
theories and vicious arts that blot our history and disfigure 
our civilization. The West perfected, if she did not invent, 
"wild-cat" banking; she crowned the "spoils system" king 
of politics ; she brought forth " manifest destiny." Mr. 
Levermore says a full revelation of the connection between 
the growth of a State banking system in the West and sun- 
dry prevalent financial doctrines about the powers of Con- 
gress is essential to a satisfactory constitutional history of the 
United States;^ and Professor W. G. Sumner points out the 
vast influence on national politics of certain Western financial 
views in the old day of the United States Bank.^ What a 



1 The Republic of New Haven, Introduction. 

2 Andrew Jackson, in Statesmen Series 119 et seq. 



NORTHWESTERN PROGRESS. 397 

change had taken place in the country when General Jackson, 
the first Western President, ascended the President's chair in 
1829 ! That the American system was not shattered to pieces 
by the admission to it of the West, before 1840, is a proof 
of its elasticity and power second only to the Civil War, 
But the West has also contributed incomparably valuable 
elements to American civilization. Mention may be made 
of her all-abounding vitality, her inexhaustible spirits, her 
unconquerable courage, her largeness of views, her freedom 
from tradition, her power of initiative, her unfailing faith in 
the Republic, and her confidence in her own destiny. As a 
group, these topics cannot be here considered ; but this work 
may fitly close with a rapid view of the trend of political 
thought in the Old Northwest. 

There are two colonial periods in the history of the United 
States. The first saw the English colonies established on the 
Atlantic slope between the Kennebec and Savannah Rivers ; 
the second saw the American colonies in the Mississippi Val- 
ley. The first planting was mainly the work of the seven- 
teenth century ; the second began before the Revolutionary 
War, but its success was not assured until at Paris, in 1782, 
the American Commissioners thwarted the purpose of the 
three powers to shut us up between the Appalachian Mountains 
and the Atlantic Ocean, and secured the Mississippi River as 
our western boundary. It is no exaggeration to say that the 
immediate effect of the first planting on the Englishman was 
small, compared with the immediate effect of the second on 
the American. For example, in the period that lies before 
the Revolution constitutional monarchy was developed into 
conservative republicanism, while in the period since the 
Revolution conservative republicanism has been developed 
into democracy. How thoroughly English the fathers of the 
Revolution were, in political ideas and temper, is conclusively 
shown by all their constructive political work, including the 
Ordinance of 1787. 



39S THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

In some respects this is the most interesting document 
that the Revolutionary era produced. All the constitutions of 
that era, and particularly the National Constitution, were 
largely the result of compromise ; but the framers of the Ordi- 
nance legislated for the wilderness, and so were not compelled 
to consult facts accomplished; they were free to put into their 
work their best ideas of what a charter of free government 
should be. And no man can read the Ordinance without see- 
ing that the men who drafted it shrank from conclusions that 
are commonly accepted now ; witness, for example, the provi- 
sions relating to the qualifications of the governor, the repre- 
sentative, and especially the elector. But these rules express 
the average republicanism of 1787. Similar rules are found in 
many of the State constitutions, and they stand as landmarks 
from which we may measure how far the American people have 
marched on the democratic road in a century. In fact, the in- 
terval between the constitutional monarchy of 1690 and the 
federal republicanism of 1790 is less than the interval between 
the federal republicanism of 1787 and the democracy of 1887. 
The progress of democratic ideas is well illustrated by the 
study of constitutional provisions relating to the suffrage, to 
the powers assigned to the legislative and executive branches 
of government, to the appointment and tenure of the judges, 
and to the length of official terms. 

In 1787 most of the States conditioned the elective fran- 
chise upon a property qualification. Notwithstanding the 
sore experience of the colonies with the veto power, as 
wielded by the colonial governors and the Crown, the States 
still left that important power in the hands of their governors. 
In twelve of the States the judges held of^ce during good be- 
havior, and in all of them they were appointed — in one by 
the governor alone, in one by the council alone, in five by the 
legislature, and in the others by the governor by and with the 
consent of a confirming body." These are the facts commonly 

' Hitchcock ; American State Constitutions, 48. 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 399 

referred to by the Jeffersonian politicians when, a few years 
later, they denounce the " monarchical " ideas and tendencies 
of the Federalists. 

The constitutions of Kentucky, 1792, and Tennessee, 1796, 
mark a distinct advance of democratical opinions. The first 
one gave the suffrage to all free male citizens twenty-one years 
of age having a two years residence in the State ; the second, 
to every freeman of the same age having a six months resi- 
dence. The first imposed no property qualification upon of- 
fice-holders ; the second required that members of the as- 
sembly should own freeholds of two hundred acres each, and 
the governor a freehold of five hundred acres. The Ken- 
tucky judges were appointed by the governor, to hold office 
during good behavior; the Tennessee judges, by the legislat- 
ure, for seven years. In Kentucky members of the House 
of Representatives were chosen annually by the qualified 
electors ; the senators and governor every four years, by 
electors chosen by the people ; the senators to be " men of 
the most wisdom, experience, and virtue above twenty-seven 
years of age." In Tennessee the same officers were chosen 
every two years at the popular elections. The Governor of 
Kentucky was clothed with the veto power, but the Gov- 
ernor of Tennessee was not so clothed. Neither of these 
constitutions was submitted to the people for their approval. 

Mr. Jefferson pronounced the constitution of Tennessee 
" the most republican yet framed in America." He must 
have been equally well satisfied with that of Ohio. This 
constitution permitted all white male inhabitants, twenty-one 
years of age, who had resided in the State one year preced- 
ing, and who also paid or were charged with a State or 
county tax, to vote at all elections. No property qualification 
was required of officers. The judges were chosen by the leg- 
islature on joint ballot of the two houses, " to hold their offices 
for the term of seven years if so long they behaved well." 
The secretary of state, the auditor, and treasurer, as well as 
the superior militia officers, were also appointed by the as- 



400 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

sembly. The governor had no veto, but he might tempora- 
rily fill vacancies in the offices, regularly filled by the legislat- 
ure, occurring in the recesses of that body. Members of the 
legislature and the governor were elected for two years by 
the people. The common explanation of the extreme limita- 
tion of the executive power and of the unusual powers given 
to the General Assembly is found in the frequent collisions 
that occurred between Governor St. Clair and the Territorial 
Legislature. This was no doubt one cause of the limitation ; 
but it is probable that the Jeffersonian theory of government 
was a more potent cause.' The Chief Magistrate of Ohio has 
always been an officer of dignity rather than of power. 

The constitution of Ohio was not submitted to the peo- 
ple. A resolution making provision for such submission was 
lost by a decided vote — ^ayes, 7 ; nays, 27. Sometimes this 
refusal has been ascribed to the supposed fear of the leaders 
of the convention that the people would not approve the con- 
stitution that had been framed, and sometimes to an undue 
anxiety to get the new government in motion. At that time, 
however, the practice of submitting constitutions to the peo- 
ple for their approval had not become thoroughly established. 
The Federalists of the State thought the failure to submit a 
serious grievance ; and it is certainly true that the State was 
brought into the Union in a manner little in accord with 
those democratical principles which the State party so loudly 
proclaimed. 

The constitutions of Indiana, 1816; of Michigan, 1837; 
and of Wisconsin, 1848, conferred the suffrage upon white 

' This is Mr. J. C. Hamilton's explanation. Commenting upon the great 
political change that occurred in 1800, he says: "The Constitution of Ohio 
shows the democratical opinions prevalent on the Western frontier. It reduced 
the executive power almost to a nonentity, elevating and enlarging that of the leg- 
islature, giving to it the election of the judges to hold ofHce for a short term of 
years, thus destroying their independence, and that of all the other officers, with 
the exception of sheriffs and coroners, who, with the governor, were to be chosen 
Ijy the suffrages of all the people, residents for a year, and who had been charged 
with a tax." — Life of Alexander Hamilton, VIL, 602. 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 401 

male citizens, twenty-one years of age, having a short residence 
in the State; that of Illinois, 1818, upon all white male in- 
habitants similarly qualified. No property-qualification was 
imposed upon office-holders in any one of them. Michigan 
and Wisconsin gave their governors the veto ; Indiana and 
Illinois did not ; Indiana and Michigan made the judges' ten- 
ure seven years ; Illinois and Wisconsin made it good behav- 
ior. In Indiana the superior judges were appointed by the 
governor, with the Senate's approval, the inferior ones by the 
legislature ; in Michigan, the superior judges were appointed 
as in Indiana, but the inferior ones were elected by the peo- 
ple. In Illinois all judges were appointed by the governor, 
with the consent of the Senate. By 1848 the tide in favor 
of an elective judiciary had attained its full volume, and we 
are not surprised to find, therefore, the Constitution of Wis- 
consin providing that all judges should be chosen by the 
qualified electors of their several circuits or counties. In 
Indiana the governor's term was made three years ; in Illinois, 
four ; in Michigan and Wisconsin, two. The Constitutions of 
the first two States were not submitted to the people ; those 
of the last two were submitted. 

Another gauge of the trend of political opinion in the 
Northwest is furnished by the history of political parties. 

The overthrow of the Federal party and the admission of 
Ohio to the Union came practically at the same time. But 
even if the Federalists could have maintained themselves in 
the old States, there is not the smallest probability that they 
could have imposed their ideas upon a single one of the 
Northwestern States. Three things that run into one an- 
other, and arc yet separable, are contemporaneous with the 
colonization of the Northwest : The establishment of the 
American Republic, the increased energy of the democratiz- 
ing movement considered as a tone of thought or stream of 
tendency, and the organization of the Democratic-Republican 
party. These causes, together with the powerful deinocratical 
stimulus of backwoods life, were more than sufficient to es- 
26 



402 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

tablish the party of Jefferson in the States of Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois. The people of these States favored the acquisi- 
tion of Louisiana and the War of 1812, and were opposed to 
a national bank. Ohio was so strongly Democratic, and the 
legislature was so all-powerful, that in 18 10 some of the judges 
who had declared State laws unconstitutional were impeached, 
and in 1820 an attempt was made to nullify the law charter- 
ing the United States Bank. Ohio voted for all the Demo- 
cratic-Republican Presidents : Jefferson, Madison, and Mon- 
roe. Clay received the electoral vote in 1824, but Adams 
received the State's vote in the House of Representatives. 
From this time on Mr. Clay had a numerous and ardent fol- 
lowing in the State. This was due partly to growing inter- 
est in a protective tariff and in internal improvements, partly 
to Mr. Clay's political history and personal character, and 
partly to the fact that he was a Western man. General Jack- 
son carried the State in 1828 and in 1832 ; Harrison, in 1836 
and 1840; Clay, in 1844; Cass, in 1848; and Pierce, in 1852. 
From 1828 to 1856 the governors were about equally divided 
between the two parties. In Indiana the Democratic-Repub- 
lican and Democratic parties elected the presidential electors 
from 1 8 16 to i860, save in 1836 and 184Q, when the Whigs car- 
ried the State. Illinois gave her electoral votes to the same 
parties down to i860, but her vote in the House of Repre- 
sentatives was cast for Adams in 1824. Michigan's electoral 
vote was cast for Van Buren in 1836, but was not counted; 
for Harrison in 1840, and for the Democratic candidates in 
1844, in 1848, and in 1852. 

In 1848 the five States all voted for General Cass, giving 
him an aggregate plurality over Taylor of 37,707; in 1852 
they all voted for General Pierce, giving him an aggregate 
plurality over Scott of 66,216. The Democratic pluralities 
had much more than kept pace with the growth of popula- 
tion. The national Democratic party felt proud and confi- 
dent in the strength of its position in 1852; but political in- 
sight could then discern, what history soon proved to be the 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 403 

fact, that only an occasion was wanting to effect a combina- 
tion of elements that would drive that party from power. A 
large majority of Northern Whigs were at heart opposed to 
the further extension of slavery. The Democratic party in 
the North also contained a large anti-slavery element. Then 
there was the Liberty party, or Free-soilers, who gave Birney 
62,300 votes in 1844; Van Buren, 291,263 in 1848 ; and Hale, 
155,825 in 1852. In the Northwest Birney's vote was 17,358 ; 
Van Buren's, 80,035 ; and Hale's, 64,619. Nor did the falling 
off in the Free-soil vote from 1848 to 1852 indicate a decline 
of the party strength ; a large part of Van Buren's vote rep- 
resented Democratic disaffection rather than anti-slavery prin- 
ciple. Obviously, here were the elements of a formidable 
new political party, if they could be united. 

Their overwhelming defeat in 1852 convinced Northern 
Whigs that the usefulness of the Whig organization was a 
thing of the past. Their great victory of the same year made 
the Democrats more blind and confident than ever; and two 
years later they repealed the Missouri Compromise, thereby 
reopening the question of slavery north of 36° 30' beyond 
the State of Missouri. This act brought the anti-slavery ele- 
ments of the North together in a new political organization 
with a rapidity and success unexampled in the history of the 
country. An anti-Nebraska convention held in Michigan in 
June, 1854, baptized the new party Republican. In Wiscon- 
sin the new party was organized with equal promptness. 
Since that time neither one of these States has ever failed 
to elect Republican electors, except that Wisconsin cast 
all her votes, and Michigan five of her fourteen votes 
for Mr. Cleveland in 1892. In these States the political 
change after 1852 was partly due to Eastern emigra- 
tion. The Republicans of Ohio elected Salmon P. Chase 
governor in 1856, and since that year, with the exception 
of a single vote cast for Mr. Cleveland in 1892, they have 
never failed to elect a full Republican electoral college. In 



404 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

Indiana and Illinois the elements that coalesced in the Re- 
publican party were weaker than in the other Northwestern 
States. The old national pike has been aptly called " a sort 
of Mason and Dixon's line, " since it formerly separated the 
Republican counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois from the 
Democratic counties. South of this line the two States were 
fully settled in 1850; north of it there were still unsettled 
tracts of territory. Population was also more dense South 
than North. Besides, the Southern-born population of Indi- 
ana was twenty per cent, of the whole population; the South- 
ern-born population of Illinois sixteen per cent, of the whole. 
The two States, respectively, gave Buchanan 118,670 and 
105,348 votes, and Fremont 94,375 and 96,189 votes. In 
the years following 1856 the Republican party increased in 
strength throughout the country. In the two States, besides 
changes of opinion, emigration told powerfully on the Repub- 
lican side. By 1870 the Southern-born population of Indiana 
had fallen to ten per cent., of Illinois to nine per cent., of the 
whole. In i860 both States gave Lincoln large majorities 
over Douglas; and since that year they have returned Re- 
publican electors, except that Indiana gave her vote to Mr. 
Tilden in 1876 and to Mr. Cleveland in 1884 and 1892, and 
Illinois her vote to Mr. Cleveland in the latter year. The Old 
Northwest has furnished the Republican party many of its 
ablest leaders ; six of the seven presidential candidates, and all 
the successful ones, have been Northwestern men. The Old 
Northwest decided the constitutional contest between freedom 
and slavery. Mr. Seward said, at Madison, Wisconsin, in i860: 
" It seems almost as if it was providential that these new States 
of the Northwest, the State of Michigan, the State of Wis- 
consin, the State of Iowa, the State of Ohio, founded on this 
reservation for freedom that had been made in the year 1787, 
matured just in the critical moment to interpose, to rally the 
free States of the Atlantic coast, to call them back to their 
ancient principles, to nerve them to sustain them in the con- 
test at the Capitol, and to send their noble and true sons and 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 405 

daughters to the plains of Kansas, to defend, at the peril of 
their homes, and even their lives, if need were, the precious 
soil which had been abandoned by the Government to slavery, 
from the intrusion of that, the greatest evil that has ever be- 
fallen our land." ' 

In the United States political changes are quite as rapid 
and extreme as any others. The history of the last thirty 
years is full of the profoundest lessons for the statesman and 
the moralist. Externally the political situation, after the pres- 
idential election of 1852, was exceedingly deceptive. No po- 
litical party ever felt more confidence in its position than the 
Democratic party in 1853. No political party was ever more 
thoroughly divided and broken than the same party eight 
years later. No political party ever accomplished its orig- 
inal object more quickly and effectually than the Republican 
party after 1861. So completely was that object secured, 
and everything logically involved in it ; so entirely have its 
original aspirations become matters of history ; so different 
are the specific party doctrines in 1887 from what they were 
in 1857, that it is not superfluous to state that the original 
Republican platform contained but one " plank " on which 
all the members of the party stood. This was the declaration 
of the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the 
territories. It was the sixth compact of 17S7 become a po- 
litical creed. This creed the Northwest embraced with the 
more alacrity because her own history and daily life were evi- 
dence of its truth and value. 

The Northwest opposed secession with much more una- 
nimity than she opposed the spread of slavery. In all the 
Northwestern States there was more or less opposition or in- 
difference to the Union cause ; in those that extended to the 
Ohio River, and particularly in Indiana and Illinois, by rea- 
son of their large Southern-born population, there was some 
actual disloyalty and overt treason ; but no other part of the 

'Works, IV., 325. 



4o6 



THE OLD NORTHWEST. 



Union has greater reason for thinking of the part it played 
in the great contest with satisfaction and pride. The Presi- 
dent, the great finance and war ministers, the foremost gen- 
erals, were Northwestern men ; while she furnished one-third 
of the total physical force that suppressed the Rebellion.' 

The Northwest has shared to the full Western faith in the 
West. What this is is best shown on a background of Eastern 
narrowness and jealousy. That the annexation of Louisiana 
in 1803 was in the line of providence will hardly be denied 
to-day by any man who believes in providence at all ; but it 
was vigorously opposed at the time, on the ground that it 
would subtract from the weight and influence of the old 
States, particularly New England. Josiah Quincy avowed 
the sentiment of great numbers of Eastern people when in 
181 1 he declared, on the floor of the House of Representa- 
tives, that the admission of the Territory of Orleans as a 
State to the Union would be its dissolution ; that it would 
free the States from their moral obligations to each other ; 
and that it would, in that event, be the duty of some States, 
as it would be the right of all, definitely to prepare for a sep- 
aration, amicably if they could, violently if they must. Dan- 
iel Webster was a man too large to share the small views of 
his Eastern neighbors ; but Daniel Webster did say in the 



■Table Showing Number of Men called for by the President of the 
United States, and Furnished by the Northwestern States, dur- 
ing THE War of the Rebellion. (This table is compiled from Phisterer : 
Statistical Record of the Armies of the United States, 10.) 





Quota. 


Total Fur- 
nished. 


Number re- 
duced to 
Three Years' 
Standard. 


Ohio ... 


306,322 
199,788 
244,496 
95,007 
109,080 


313,180 
196,363 
259,09.2 
87.364 
91,327 


240,514 
153,576 
214,133 




Illinois 


Michigan 


Wisconsin . 


79,260 


Total 


954,693 
2,763,670 


947,326 
2,859,132 


767,594 
2,320,27a 


Total for the United States 





A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 407 

Senate, in 1846, that the St. Johns was worth a hundred times 
as much as the Columbia was or ever would be. The speech 
of the Revolution was continental ; there was the " Continen- 
tal Congress," the " Continental Money," the " Continental 
Army ;" but the ideas of the Revolution were not continen- 
tal. It is one of the achievements of the West to have taught 
the East the continental lesson. 

Her geographical position and relations have always caused 
the Northwest to take a deep interest in the territorial ex- 
pansion and integrity of the Union, and particularly in the 
use and ownership of the Mississippi River. First and last, 
that river has presented five distinct questions to the Ameri- 
can people. 

The question of 1782 was : " Shall the United States ex- 
tend to the Mississippi, or shall the country beyond the 
mountains be left to England or Spain, or to the two powers 
together?" The answer given to this question was the 
boundaries of 1783. 

The second question was : " Shall the United States, and 
particularly the West, be allowed that use and benefit of the 
river to which their position fairly entitles them, or shall 
Spain be suffered to exclude them from its waters ? " This 
question first arose when Mr. Jay was sent to the Spanish 
Court to negotiate a treaty of alliance. Nothing was con- 
cluded at Madrid or at Paris touching this question ; so far 
from it, the concession by England of the independence of the 
States, with their rightful boundaries, led at once to new 
complications. Immediately on its acquisition in 1763, Great 
Britain divided Florida into two provinces, on the Appalachi- 
cola River, and made the St. Marys River, a line drawn from 
its head to the junction of the Flint and Appalachicola Rivers, 
and the parallel 31° north latitude, from the last of these 
streams to the Mississippi, their northern boundary. But the 
next year she carried the line of West Florida north to the 
parallel passing through the mouth of the Yazoo River. The 
northern Florida line as fixed in 1763, Great Britain, twenty 



4o8 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

years later, gave to the United States as their southern boun- 
dary. But during the war, to which Spain had become a 
party as an ally of France, she had recovered nearly all of 
the Floridas, and was actually holding the territory at its close. 
Accordingly, on the same day that Great Britain acknowl- 
edged the independence of the United States and fixed their 
boundaries, she ceded the Floridas to Spain, but without 
making any boundaries whatever. Spain soon came forward 
with a claim that the block of territory lying between the 
northern West Florida lines of 1763 and 1764 belonged to 
her, which the United States repelled. Nor was this all; 
Spain continued to deny to American citizens the right to 
navigate the Mississippi River. These were burning ques- 
tions, for Western population was steadily increasing in num- 
bers, and it had no practicable way to reach the outer world 
but the great channel that Nature had provided. These two 
questions exerted a profound influence upon Western affairs^ 
and they entered deeply into National politics. Spain always 
conducted herself with procrastination, and often with arro- 
gance. For the time, she was in possession, and had the mili- 
tary force to maintain her position ; the Government at 
Washington was unable to enforce its rights to either the 
disputed territory or to the navigation of the river ; and so 
the two questions were left to the logic of events. Finally, 
in 1795, when the situation had become intolerable to the 
United States and dangerous to Spain, the two powers entered 
into the Treaty of San Lorenzo, which was intended to com- 
pose all their difficulties. 

Article 2 of this treaty confirmed the boundary given to 
the United States by England in 1783. The same article 
provided for the withdrawal of any troops, garrisons, or settle- 
ments that either party might have within the territory of the 
other party, said withdrawal to be made within six months 
after the ratification of the treaty, and sooner, if possible. 
Article 3 made provision for a commission to survey and mark 
the boundary from the Mississippi to the sea. Article 4 de- 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 409 

dared the middle of the channel of the Mississippi the west- 
ern boundary of the States, from their northern boundary to 
the thirty-first parallel of north latitude. Article 4 also de- 
clared : " And His Catholic Majesty has likewise agreed that 
the navigation of the said river, in its whole breadth from its 
source to the ocean, shall be free only to his subjects and the 
citizens of the United States, unless he should extend this 
privilege to the subjects of other powers by special conven- 
tion." Article 22 permitted the citizens of the United States, 
for three years, to deposit their merchandise in the port of 
New Orleans, and reship the same without other duty or 
charge than a fair price for storage, and declared that His Cath- 
olic Majesty would either extend this right of deposit beyond 
the three years or would assign the Americans some other 
place of deposit on the bank of the river. 

Perhaps the United States fondly expected that the Treaty 
of Madrid would end all troubles. Far from it. The con- 
cessions that it contained were extorted from Spain by fears 
growing out of the state of Continental affairs, and there is 
only too much reason to think that she regarded them only 
as diplomatic manoeuvres, to serve a temporary purpose. 
Certain it is that Spanish procrastination and intrigue delayed 
carrying into effect the promise in regard to withdrawing 
troops and garrisons; and it was not until March, 1798, that 
the Spanish Governor stealthily abandoned rather than for- 
mally surrendered the territory above the thirty-first parallel. 
Then, on the expiration of the three years, the Spanish In- 
tendant at New Orleans denied the longer right of deposit at 
that port, and failed to designate, as the Treaty of Madrid pro- 
vided, an " equivalent establishment." This act set the West 
all in a ferment again, and war between the two nations 
seemed imminent. Alarmed at the prospect of war, Spain 
reopened the port, but only to close it again in 1802, just as 
Louisiana was slipping from the hand of His Catholic Majesty 
into the hand of First Consul Bonaparte. 

Such was the answer to the second Mississippi question. 



4IO THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

The third question was : " Shall the United States or 
France own and control the mouth of the river ? " It really- 
involved the ownership of theWestern half of the great valley. 
The natural boundary of the United States in 1783 was the 
Mississippi ; they could not safely stop short of that limit — 
they need not extend beyond it ; but in 1803 it was as important 
for them to control the river absolutely as it had been for them 
twenty years before to extend to its middle line. In 1800 
Spain, having been in possession for thirty-seven years, agreed 
to retrocede Louisiana to France ; and this agreement, as soon 
as known on this side of the ocean, brought the new question 
immediately to the front. In April, 1802, President Jefferson 
wrote to Robert R. Livingston, the American minister at 
Paris : " There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of 
which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, 
through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory 
must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long 
yield more than one-half of our whole produce, and contain 
more than half our inhabitants." ' In February, 1803, he wrote 
to M. Dupont : " The suspension of the right of deposit at 
New Orleans, ceded to us by our treaty with Spain, threw our 
whole country into such a ferment as immediately threatened 
its peace. This, however, was believed to be the act of the In- 
tendant unauthorized by his government. But it showed the 
necessity of making effectual arrangements to secure the peace 
of the two countries against the indiscreet acts of subordinate 
agents. . . . The occlusion of the Mississippi is a state of 
things in which we cannot exist. , . . Our circumstances 
are so imperious as to admit of no delay as to our course, and 
the use of the Mississippi so indispensable that we cannot 
hesitate one moment to hazard our existence for its mainten- 
ance " ° How urgent the case was is apparent from the rapid 
growth of population on what were then called " the Western 
waters," the boundless capabilities of the country that they 

' Works, IV., 432. 2 Works, IV., 457. 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 41 I 

occupied, and their absolute dependence upon the Mississippi 
as a means of reaching the markets of the world. Exclusive 
of Western Pennsylvania, the over-mountain population was 
166,641 in 1790, 469,397 in 1800, and 1,162,939 in 18 10, 
What was less than five per cent, of the total population of 
the Union grew in twenty years to be more than sixteen per 
cent. The annexation of Louisiana by purchase in 1803 was 
the answer that the Republic made to the third Mississippi 
question. It reunited, politically and historically, the great 
valley, divided since 1763. Mr. Madison in 1802 said "the 
Mississippi was everything to the Western people; the Hud- 
son, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable streams 
of the Atlantic States formed into one stream." 

The transfer of Louisiana to the United States filled the 
Court of Spain with fresh alarm and anger. It confirmed the 
worst fears that she had entertained in 1782; it removed the 
screen heretofore interposed between the United States and 
Mexico ; and it immediately gave rise to the fourth question : 
" Shall the United States reap all the advantages naturally 
flowing from the purchase — shall the act of 1803 stand in its 
full integrity?" Practically, it assumed the form: "What 
are the extent and boundaries of the purchase ?" The treaty 
answered : " The colony or province of Louisiana with the 
same extent that it n<^v has in the hands of Spain, and that 
it had when France possessed it, and such as it should be 
after the treaties subsequently entered into between Spain and 
other States." ' History alone could tell what this language 
meant, and the two powers could not agree as to her answer. 
After a long controversy that more than once threatened to 
involve them in war, in 1819 they came to an agreement. 
Florida became a possession of the United States by purchase, 
thus ending the dispute as to the eastern extension of Louisi- 
ana ; and the Sabine, the Red River, the one-hundredth me- 

' Spain was still in actual possession of the province when the treaty was 
signed. She delivered it to France, November 30, 1803, and France to the 
United States a month later. 



412 THE OLD NORTHWEST. 

ridian, the Arkansas, and the forty-second parallel of North 
latitude were made the boundary between the United States 
and Mexico, thus practically excluding the Spaniard from the 
Mississippi Valley. 

The fifth and last Mississippi question came with the Civil 
War. " Shall the Father of Waters flow all the way from his 
remotest sources to the sea through the territory of the 
United States, or shall he, below latitude 36° 30", roll his 
floods through a foreign country ?" This question involved 
all that had gone before it. The Southern leaders thought 
the river so indispensable to the Northwest that, threatened 
with its loss, it would rather cleave to the South and 
part company with the East. These leaders did not mis- 
calculate the estimate that the people of the Northwest set 
upon the river. But they wofuUy miscalculated the terms 
upon which they were willing to possess it. How thoroughly 
the Northwestern people comprehended the issue, and the 
means by which it must be reached, is shown by the heroic 
part which they sustained in the long and arduous effort to 
reopen the Mississippi after it had been closed by the Con- 
federacy. Still, the Northwestern troops have not the exclu- 
sive glory of winning back to the Union this great national 
highway. President Lincoln thus distributed the honor of 
this glorious achievement in August, 1^63 : " The Father of 
Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great 
Northwest for it ; nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred 
miles up they met New England, Empire, Keystone, and Jer- 
sey hewing their way right and left. The sunny South, too, 
in more colors than one also lent a helping hand. On the 
spot, their part of the history was jotted down in black and 
white. The job was a great national one, and let none be 
slighted who bore an honorable part in it." ' The mainte- 
nance of the Union was the answer to the last Mississippi 
question. 

' Raymond : Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, 442. 



APPENDIX. 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. 



[The text here followed is that of the " Old South Leaflets," General Series, No. 13.] 



An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the 
United States Northwest of the River Ohio. 

Be it ordamed by the United States in Congress assembled, That the 
said territory, for the purposes of temporary government, be one dis- 
trict, subject, however, to be divided into two districts, as future circum- 
stances may, in the opinion of Congress, make it expedient. 

Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That the estates, both of 
resident and non-resident proprietors in the said territory, dying intes- 
tate, shall descend to, and be distributed among, their children, and the 
descendants of a deceased child, in equal parts ; the descendants of a 
deceased child or grandchild to take the share of their deceased parent 
in equal parts among them : And where there shall be no children or 
descendants, then in equal parts to the next of kin in equal degree ; 
and, among collaterals, the children of a deceased brother or sister of the 
intestate shall have, in equal parts among them, their deceased parents' 
share : and there shall, in no case, be a distinction between kindred of 
the whole and half-blood ; saving, in all cases, to the widow of the intes- 
tate her third part of the real estate for life, and one-third part of the 
personal estate ; and this law, relative to descents and dower, shall re- 
main in full force until altered by the legislature of the district. And, 
until the governor and judges shall adopt lavys as hereinafter mentioned, 
estates in the said territory may be devised or bequeathed by wills in 
writing, signed and sealed by him or her, in whom the estate may be 
(being of full age,) and attested by three witnesses ; and real estates 
may be conveyed by lease and release, or bargain and sale, signed. 



414 APPENDIX. 

sealed, and delivered by the person, being of full age, in whom the 
estate may be, and attested by two witnesses, provided such wills be 
duly proved, and such conveyances be acknowledged, or the execution 
thereof duly proved, and be recorded within one year after proper mag- 
istrates, courts, and registers shall be appointed for that purpose ; and 
personal property may be transferred by delivery ; saving, however to 
the French and Canadian inhabitants, and other settlers of the Kas- 
kaskias, St. Vincents, and the neighboring villages who have hereto- 
fore professed themselves citizens of Virginia, their laws and customs 
now in force among them, relative to the descent and conveyance of 
property. 

Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That there shall be ap- 
pointed, from time to time, by Congress, a governor, whose commission 
shall continue in force for the term of three years, unless sooner revoked 
by Congress ; he shall reside in the district, and have a freehold estate 
therein in looo acres of land, while in the exercise of his office. 

There shall be appointed, from time to time, by Congress, a secre- 
tary, whose commission shall continue in force for four years unless 
sooner revoked ; he shall reside in the district, and have a freehold 
estate therein in 500 acres of land, while in the exercise of his office ; 
it shall be his duty to keep and preserve the acts and laws passed by 
the legislature, and the public records of the district, and the proceed- 
ings of the governor in his Executive department ; and transmit au- 
thentic copies of such acts and proceedings, every six months, to the 
Secretary of Congress : There shall also be appointed a court to con- 
sist of three judges, any two of whom to form a court, who shall have 
a common law jurisdiction, and reside in the district, and have each 
therein a freehold estate in 500 acres of land while in the exercise of 
their offices ; and their commissions shall continue in force during good 
behavior. 

The governor and judges, or a majority of them, shall adopt and 
publish in the district such laws of the original States, criminal and 
civil, as may be necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the 
district, and report them to Congress from time to time : which laws 
shall be in force in the district until the organization of the General 
Assembly therein, unless disapproved of by Congress ; but, afterwards, 
the legislature shall have authority to alter them as they shall think fit. 

The governor, for the time being, shall be commander-in-chief of 



APPENDIX. 415 

the militia, appoint and commission all officers in the same below the 
rank of general officers ; all general officers shall be appointed and 
commissioned by Congress. 

Previous to the organization of the General Assembly, the governor 
shall appoint such magistrates and other civil officers, in each county 
or township, as he shall find necessary for the preservation of the peace 
and good order in the same : After the General Assembly shall be 
organized, the powers and duties of the magistrates and other civil 
officers, shall be regulated and defined by the said assembly; but all 
magistrates and other civil officers, not herein otherwise directed, shall, 
during the continuance of this temporary government, be appointed by 
the governor. 

For the prevention of crimes and injuries, the laws to be adopted 
or made shall have force in all parts of the district, and for the execu- 
tion of process, criminal and civil, the governor shall make proper divi- 
sions thereof; and he shall proceed, from time to time, as circumstances 
may require, to lay out the parts of the district in which the Indian 
titles shall have been extinguished, into counties and townships, 
subject, however, to such alterations as may thereafter be made by the 
legislature. 

So soon as there shall be 5000 free male inhabitants of full age in 
the district, upon giving proof thereof to the governor, they shall re- 
ceive authority, with time and place, to elect representatives from their 
counties or townships to represent them in the General Assembly : 
Provided, That, for every 500 free male inhabitants, there shall be one 
representative, and so on progressively with the number of free male 
inhabitants, shall the right of representation increase, until the number 
of representatives shall amount to 25 ; after which, the number and 
proportion of representatives shall be regulated by the legislature : Pro- 
viddd, That no person be eligible or qualified to act as a representative 
unless he shall have been a citizen of one of the United States three 
years, and be a resident in the district, or unless he shall have resided 
in the district three years ; and, in either case, shall likewise hold in his 
own right, in fee simple, 200 acres of land within the same : Provided, 
also. That a freehold in 50 acres of land in the district, having been 
a citizen of one of the States, and being resident in the district, or the 
like freehold and two years residence in the district, shall be necessary 
to qualify a man as an elector of a representative. 



4l6 . APPENDIX. 

The representatives thus elected, shall serve for the term of two 
years ; and, in case of the death of a representative, or removal from 
office, the governor shall issue a writ to the county or township for 
which he was a member, to elect another in his stead, to serve for the 
residue of the term. 

The General Assembly, or Legislature, shall consist of the governor, 
legislative council, and a house of representatives. The legislative 
council shall consist of five members, to continue in office five years, 
unless sooner removed by Congress ; any three of whom to be a 
quorum : and the members of the council shall be nominated and 
appointed in the following manner, to wit : As soon as representatives 
shall be elected, the governor shall appoint a time and place for them 
to meet together; and, when met, they shall nominate ten" persons, 
residents in the district, and each possessed of a freehold in 500 acres 
of land, and return their names to Congress ; five of whom Congress 
shall appoint and commission to serve as aforesaid ; and, whenever a 
vacancy shall happen in the council, by death or removal from office, 
the house of representatives shall nominate two persons, qualified as 
aforesaid, for each vacancy, and return their names to Congress ; one 
of whom Congress shall appoint and commission for the residue of the 
term. And every five years, four months at least before the expiration 
of the time of service of the members of council, the said house shall 
nominate ten persons, qualified as aforesaid, and return their names to 
Congress ; five of whom Congress shall appoint and commission to serve 
as members of the council five years, unless sooner removed. And the 
governor, legislative council, and house of representatives, shall have 
authority to make laws in all cases, for the good government of the 
district, not repugnant to the principles and articles in this ordinance 
established and declared. And all bills, having passed by a majority 
in the house, and by a majority in the council, shall be referred to the 
governor for his assent; but no bill, or legislative act whatever, shall be 
of any force without his assent. The governor shall have power to 
convene, prorogue, and dissolve the General Assembly, when, in his 
opinion, it shall be expedient. 

The governor, judges, legislative council, secretary, and such other 
officers as Congress shall appoint in the district, shall take an oath or 
affirmation of fidelity and of office ; the governor before the President 
of Congress, and all other officers before the governor. As soon as 



APPENDIX. 417 

a legislature shall be formed in the district, the council and house 
assembled in one room, shall have authority, by joint ballot, to elect a 
delegate to Congress, who shall have a seat in Congress, with a right of 
debating but not of voting during this temporary government. 

And, for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious 
liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws and 
constitutions are erected ; to fix and establish those principles as the 
basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever here- 
after shall be formed in the said territory : to provide also for the 
establishment of States, and permanent government therein, and for 
their admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing 
with the original States, at as early periods as may be consistent with 
the general interest : 

// is hereby ordained and declared by the authority aforesaid, Tliat 
the following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between 
the original States and the people and States in the said territory and 
forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent, to wit : 

Art. I St. No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and 
•orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of 
■worship or religious sentiments, in the said territory. 

Art. 2d. The inhabitants of the said territory shall always be en- 
titled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by 
jury ; of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature ; 
and of judicial proceedings according to the course of the common 
law. All persons shall be bailable, unless for capital offences, where 
the proof shall be evident or the presumption great. All fines shall be 
moderate ; and no cruel or unusual punishments shall be inflicted. No 
man shall be deprived of his liberty or property, but by the judgment 
•of his peers or the law of the land ; and, should the public exigencies 
make it necessary, for the common preservation, to take any person's 
property, or to demand his particular services, full compensation shall 
be made for the same. And, in the just preservation of rights and 
property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be 
made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner 
■whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, 
bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed. 

Art. 3d. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to 
good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the 

27 



4l8 APPENDIX. 

means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good 
faith shall always be observed towards the Indians ; their lands and 
property shall never be taken from them without their consent ; and, 
in their properly, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or 
disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress ; but 
laws founded in justice and humanity, shall, from time to time, be 
made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving 
peace and friendship with them. 

Art. 4th. The said territory, and the States which may be formed 
therein, shall forevei remain a part of this confederacy of the United 
States of America, subject to the Articles of Confederation, and to such 
alterations therein as shall be constitutionally made ; and to all the 
acts and ordinances of the United States in Congress assembled, con- 
formable thereto. The inhabitants and settlers in the said territory 
shall be subject to pay a part of the federal debts contracted or to be 
contracted, and a proportional part of the expenses of government, to 
be apportioned on them by Congress according to the same common 
rule and measure by which apportionments thereof shall be made on 
the other States; and the taxes, for paying their proportion, shall \ 
be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of 
the district or districts, or new States, as in the original States, within 
the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled. 
The legislatures of those districts or new States, shall never interfere 
with the primary disposal of the soil by the United States in Congress 
assembled, nor with any regulations Congress may find necessary for 
securing the title in such soil to the bona fide purchasers. No tax 
shall be imposed on lands the property of the United States ; and, in 
no case, shall non-resident proprietors be taxed higher than residents. 
The navigable waters leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, 
and the carrying places between the same, shall be common highways, 
and forever free, as well to the inhabitants of the said territory as to the 
citizens of the United States, and those of any other States that may 
be admitted into the Confederacy, without any tax, impost, or duty, 
therefor. 

Art. 5th. There shall be formed in the said territory, not less than 
three nor more than five States ; and the boundaries of the States, as 
soon as Virginia shall alter her act of cession, and consent to the same, 
shall become fixed and established as follows, to wit : The Western 



APPENDIX. 419 

State in the said territory, shall be bounded by the Mississippi, the 
Ohio, and Wabash rivers ; a direct line drawn from the Wabash and 
Post St. Vincent's, due North, to the territorial line between the United 
States and Canada ; and, by the said territorial line, to the Lake of 
the Woods and Mississippi. The middle State shall be bounded by the 
said direct line, the Wabash from Post Vincent's, to the Ohio ; by the 
Ohio, by a direct line, drawn due North from the mouth of the Great 
Miami, to the Said territorial line, and by the said territorial line. The 
Eastern State shall be bounded by the last mentioned direct line, the 
Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the said territorial line : Provided^ however, 
and it is further understood and declared, that the boundaries of these 
three States shall be subject so far to be altered, that, if Congress shall 
hereafter find it expedient, they shall have authority to form one or 
two States in that part of the said territory which lies North of an East 
and West line drawn through the Southerly bend or extreme of Lake 
Michigan. And, whenever any of the said States shall have 60,000 
free inhabitants therein, such State shall be admitted, by its delegates, 
into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the 
original States in all respects whatever, and shall be at liberty to form a 
permanent constitution and State government : Provided, the constitu- 
tion and government so to be formed, shall be republican, and in con- 
formity to the principles contained in these articles ; and, so far as it 
can be consistent with the general interest of the confederacy, such 
admission shall be allowed at an earlier period, and when there may be 
a less number of free inhabitants in the State than 60,000. 

Art. 6th. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude 
in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, 
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted : Provided, always, 
That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is 
lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be 
lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her 
labor or service as aforesaid. 

Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid. That the resolutions of the 
23d of April, 1784, relative to the subject of this ordinance, be, and 
the same are hereby, repealed and declared null and void. 

Done by the United States, in Congress assembled, the 13th day 
of July, in the year of our Lord 1787, and of their sovereignty 
and independence the twelfth. 



INDEX. 



Acadia, province of, ceded to England, 
66. 

Adams, John, instructions to, 167. 

Adams, J. Q., opinion on Oiiio and 
Micliigan boundary question, 323. 

Admission of Northwestern States, 
remarks on, 307. 

Aix-Ia-Chapelle, terms of treaty of, 57. 

Albany Congress, the, 125, 195. 

Allegheny Valley, the, occupied by 
the French, 47. 

Allen, Pennsylvania commissioner on 
the boundary dispute with Connecti- 
cut, 107. 

Amendments to Articles of Confedera- 
tion proposed, 200. 

Anglo-French War, the, character of, 

55- 
Anti-Slavery views in Ohio, 380. 
A.randa, Count de, negotiations with 

Mr. Jay, 175. 
Ark, the, on Western rivers, 293. 
Arkansas, influence of, on admission 

of Michigan, 324. 
Articles of Confederation, the, 216. 
Arthur I., Governor St. Clair, 300. 
Augusta County, Virginia, created, 

104. 
Ayllon, Spanish explorer, 6. 



Baltimore, Lord, and Maryland, 78. 
Banks, hostility to, in Wisconsin, 333. 
Berkeley, Lord John, buys New Jersey, 

95- 
Bienville, Coleron de, report on Ohio 
valley, 61. 



Bird, Captain, British officer, 13S. 
Blanca, Count Florida, relations with 

Mr. Jay, 172. 
Boone, Daniel, in Kentucky, 257. 
Boundary lines, difficulty of defining, 

20; disputes concerning between 

Connecticut and New York, 94; of 

the United States, 121, 165, 180, 187. 
Brandt, Indian chief, in Wyoming 

valley, 115. 
British Government, the, Western 

land policy of, 120; occupation of 

West by, after the Revolution, 1S4. 
Brule, Etienne, discovers copper in 

the Lake Superior country, 15. 
" Bunch of Grapes," the, meeting at, 

260. 
Burke, Edmund, on America, 145. 
Butler, the Tory, in Wyoming - valley, 

115. 
Butler, Captain Zebulon, in Wyoming 

valley, 112. 

Cabot, John, discovers America, 12. 

Cadillac, La Motte, founds Detroit, 47. 

Cahokia, 283. 

Campus Martius, the, of Marietta, 276. 

Canada, taken possession of, by Cartier, 
10 ; ceded to England, 66; Franklin's 
pamphlet concerning, 126, 127; pro- 
posed cession to the United States, 
169; refugees from, lands reserved 
for, 251. 

Cape Breton Island, ceded to England, 
66. 

Carroll, Daniel, delegate to Congress 
from Maryland, 216. 



422 



INDEX. 



Carolina Grant, the, So. 

Carteret, Sir George, buys New Jersey 
with Lord Berkeley, 95. 

Cartier, James, visits Canada, 9. 

Center of population, the, in the 
United States, 383. 

Cessions of Western lands, Maryland's 
influence upon, 210; by New York, 
223, 231 ; by Virginia, 23S ; by Mas- 
sachusetts, 240 ; by Connecticut, 241 ; 
dangers to the Republic averted by, 

245. 

Champlain, Samuel de, in Nova Scotia 
and Canada, 10, 22, 23. 

Charles I., grant of, to Lord Baltimore, 
78. 

Charles IL, grant of Carolina by, to 
the Eight Proprietors, 80; charters 
Connecticut, 60, 87 ; to Rhode Island, 
88; to Duke of York, 92 ; to William 
Penn, 98. 

Charters, to Sir Walter Raleigh, 71 ; 
to Lord Baltimore, 78; to Carolina, 
80; to Connecticut, 60, 87 ; to Rhode 
Island, 88 ; to William Penn, 98. 

Chase, Chief Justice, on claims of the 
United States to Western lands, 244. 

Chippewas, the, cede lands, 248. 

Choate, Rufus, on colonial boundaries, 
90. 

Christian Indians, the, in Ohio, 251. 

Church lands, the, in Ohio, 267. 

Cincinnati, the. Society of, 279. 

Cincinnati, the city, early name of, 278. 

Clark, George Rogers, conquest of the 
country west of the Ohio by, 153, 
183 ; instructions received by from 
Governor Patrick Henry, 154. 

Clarendon, Earl of, sells Plymouth 
Grant, 82. 

Cleaveland, General Moses, visits 
Western Reserve, 363. 

Co-education in Northwest, 395. 

Colbert, represses political life in 
Canada, 52. 

Coles, Governor Edward, part of, in 
slavery contest in Illinois, 350, 353. 

Colonial periods, two, 397. 

Colonies, the, French and English con- 
trasted, 38, 39; extent of the thirteen 
in 1776, 164. 



Color Line, the, in Ohio Constitution, 

347- 
Columbia, settlement in Ohio, 278. 
Columbia River, the, Webster's view of, 

389- 
Committee on Northwestern land 
claims, 218, 220. 

"Conception," the, Mississippi so 
called, 31. 

Confederacy, fear of a Western and 
Southern, influences Northern boun- 
dary of Illinois, 317. 

Confederation, the, articles of, 201. 

Congress, land policy of, 199, 213. 

Connecticut, how originally consti- 
tuted, 87 ; company chartered, 87 ; 
and New Haven consolidated, 88; 
disputes with Massachusetts, 89; 
disputes with New York, 94; dis- 
putes with the Penns, no; west- 
ward emigration from, 112; men in 
Pennsylvania, 114; claims to West- 
ern lands, 193 ; cedes Western 
lands to Congress, 241 ; retains 
Western Reserve, 358 ; school fund 
of, 360 ; Land Company, 362 ; re- 
signs jurisdiction of Western Re- 
serve to Congress, 368 ; influence of, 
on Western Reserve, 378. 

Connolly, Dr. John, agitator, in West- 
ern Pennsylvania, 106, 152. 

Continental Army, the, condition of, 
at close of Revolution; 259. 

Coronado, explores Mississippi val- 
ley, 7. 

Coureurs des Bois, character of, 41. 

Courts, the, in Northwest in early 
days, 293. 

Culpepper, Lord, grant of lands to, 
in Virginia, 79. 

Carrituck River, the, a boundary line,8o. 

Cutler, Dr. Manasseh, in connection 
with Northwestern affairs, 260, 267, 
336. 

Crawford, Col. William, death of, loS. 

Crawford, W. IL, on slavery in the 
'^Vest, 353. 

Croghan, Col., report of, on habitants, 
48, 49. 

Crozat, Anthony, grant of Louisiana 
to, 51. 



INDEX. 



423 



Dklawark, bought by Penn, 99; be- 
comes independent, 103. 

Delawares, the, cede lands, 248. 

Delaware company, the, 112. 

Democratic party in Northwest, the, 
402. 

De Narvaez, expedition of, to Gulf 
Region, 7. 

Denonville, Governor of Canada, 40. 

De Soto, expedition of, 7. 

" De Tret," fort, 47. 

Detroit founded, 27 ; straits occupied 
by French, 42; population in 1765, 
48; in the Revolution, 150; impor- 
tance of, 156. 

De Vaca, Cabeza, explorations of, 7. 

Dickerson, senator, on Oregon, 3S4. 

Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, pro- 
posals of in regard to Western Penn- 
sylvania, 104, 105. 

Dixon, Charles, surveys with Jeremiah 
Mason, Mason and Dixon's Line, 
103. 

Dongan, Governor, gains western lands 
for New York, 41. 

Duane, representative in Congress 
from New York, makes deed of 
limitation, 215. 

Du Luht, French explorer, beyond 
Lake Superior, 36; at Detroit, 42. 

Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, con- 
troversy with the Penns^ 107 ; ig- 
nores Quebec Act, 144. 

Duquesne, Governor of Canada, seizes 
the northeast branches of the Ohio, 
6r. 

Dutch, the, trading-posts of, in New 
York, 39; discoveries of, go; claims 
of, ignored by the English, 91. 

Early representatives of Ohio in Con- 
gress, the, 313. 

Education in Northwest, 391-395. 

Educational features of Ordinance of 
1787, the, 391. 

Edwards, Ninian, Governor of Illinois 
Territory, 303. 

Electors, the qualifications of, in North- 
west Territory, 262. 

Elizabeth, Queen, gives charter to 
Raleigh, 71. 



Elliot, the Refugee, among Western 
Indians, 150. 

Emigration, paths of, to the West, 319. 

Enabling act for Ohio, the, 309, 311. 

England, claim of, in North America, 
12; yields Western posts, 1S5; 
treaties of, with Indians, 60. 

English, the, on the Atlantic Plain, 
12. 

Entails, provision in regard to, in Ordi- 
nance of 1787, 261. 

Erie, city, site of, occupied liy French, 
47 ; lake, discovered, 26. 



Fairfax, Lord, lands of, in Virginia, 

79- 

P^allen timbers, victory of, 184. 

Father Marquette, on Mississippi 
River, 30. 

Fearing, Paul, first lawyer in North- 
west, 278. 

Federal character, the, of the United 
States, 165; theory of government, 
245. 

Federalists, the, views of, on admission 
of Ohio, 298, 299. 

Fire lands, the, allotment of, 359. 

Five Nations, the, 57. 

Five-State plan, the, for the Northwest, 

311- 

Plorida, ceded to England, 68 ; East 
and West constituted, I2i ; boun- 
dary dispute, 408 ; purchased, 411. 

Floyd, delegate to Congress from New 
York', 215. 

Fort, Crevecoeur built, 35 ; Duquesne 
built, 62 ; Harmar built, 275 ; Le 
Bosuf, 61; Mcintosh, 24S ; Stan- 
wix, 134, 248; St. Louis, 43; Ve- 
nango, 61. 

Franklin, Dr. Benjamin, his plan for 
settling Western colonies, 126; 
"Canada Pamphlet" of, 127; reply 
of, to Lord Hillsborough, 135 ; argu- 
ments of, for the Grand Company, 
136; commissioner of United States 
at Paris, 169; demands Mississippi 
River for Western limit of the United 
States, 174; outwit i Vergennes, 181. 

Franquelin, map of, 51. 



424 



INDEX. 



French, the, in valley of the St. Law- 
rence, 9 ; discoveries made by in 
the Northwest, 21 ; of Illinois, kindly 
disposed toward Americans, 159; 
settlers, their character, 52, 161; 
alliance with the United States, 161, 
167. 

French and Indian War, the, 62, 65, 66, 
68. 

Frontenac, Count, Governor of Canada, 
sends Joliet to discover the Mis- 
sissippi, 31 ; policy of, 46. 

Fulton and Harris Lines, the, 321. 

Fur Trade, the, in Northwest, 40. 

Galissoni^re, Governor of Canada, 
61. 

Galinee, makes first map of the lakes, 
27. 

Galvez, Governor of Louisiana, mili- 
tary successes of, 173. 

Gates, Sir Thomas, giant to, from 
James I., 72. 

Georgia, colony, founded, 81. 

Genesee Valley, the, surrendered to 
Massachusetts, 119. 

Gibault, Father Pierre, assists Clark, 

•55- 

Girard, French Representative at Phil- 
adelphia, 172. 

Girty Brothers, the, in Indian war- 
fare, 150. 

Gist, Christopher, explores the Ohio 
valley, 58. 

Gladstone, W. E., describes territory 
of the United States, 186. 

" Gore," the, in Southern New York, 
118. 

Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, attempts of, to 
plant colonies, 85. 

Grand Company, the. Western plans 
of, 133- 

Grayson, William, arguments of, for 
yielding Western Reserve to Con- 
necticut, 242. 

Griffin, the, voyage on Upper Lakes, 
32- 

Grosselliers, with - Radisson, visits 
country beyond Lake Superior, 26. 

Guadaloupe, island of, preferred to 
Canada, 130. 



Habitants, the, of the West, history 
of, from 1763 to the Revolution, 150. 

Hacluyt, Richard, geographical no- 
tions of, 119. 

Haldeman, General, refuses to sur- 
render Northwestern posts, 1S4. 

Halsey and Ward, land purchase of, 
u8. 

Hamilton, Governor at Detroit, adopts 
modes of Indian warfare, 149; civil 
and military head of Northwest, 150; 
made prisoner by Clark, 156. 

Hanson, John, delegate to Congress 
from Maryland, 216. 

Harris and Fulton Lines, the, 321. 

Harrison, William Henry, delegate to 
Congress, 296; Governor of Indiana, 

304- 
Heights of Abraham, Wolfe's victory 

on, 69. 
Hennepin, Father, with La Salle, 34. 
Henry, Governor Patrick, instructions 

to Clark, 154 ; views of, on Detroit, 

1 58. 
Hillsborough, Lord, objections of, to 

the Walpole Company, 134. 
Hopton, Lord, grant to, in Virginia, 79. 
Hudson Bay, restored to England, 56. 
Hudson, Henry, navigator and dis- 
coverer, 90. 
Hull, General William, Governor of 

Michigan Territory, 304. 
Huron, Lake, discovered, 23, 24. 
Hutchins, Thomas, author of United 

States Plan of Land Surveys, 254. 

Illinois, separated from Louisiana 
52; county established by Virginia, 
159; river seized by Spain, 174; 
county claims, 223; settlement of, un- 
der Virginia rule, 2S3, 284 ; as a Ter- 
ritory, 304, 305 ; admitted as a State, 
305, 318; northern boundary of, 
317 ; dispute of, with Wisconsin, 
320 ; slavery in, 344 ; character of 
emigrants to, 348 ; population of, in 
1890, 3S5. 

Independence, port of, 363. 

Indentures of slaves in Indiana and 
Illinois, 344. 

Indians, the, position of, in French 



INDEX. 



425 



plan of colonization, 22 ; land titles 
of, 59; allies of the English, 149; 
in War of the Revolution, 184; 
treaties of, 244; slave holders, 338; 
slaves, 239. 

Indiana Claim, the, 223. 

Indiana, the Territory, settlement of, 
283, 297; admitted as a State, 316; 
prohibits slavery, 348 ; population 
of, in 1890, 385. 

Industries of Western settlements, 
the, 50. 

Ingles-Draper Settlement, the, 58. 

Iowa, Territory of, founded, 330. 

Iroquois, the, destroy the Hurons, 24; 
influence of, on our national his- 
tory, 25 ; convey their lands in trust 
to England, 39; cede Western lands 
to New York, 41 ; cede Huron 
country to England, 46; conquests 
of, claimed by England, 65 ; title of, 
to Ohio lands, 137. 

Jackson, President, position of, in re- 
gard to Ohio boundary, 323. 

Jamestown, Va., founded, 6, 12. 

James I., grant of, to Sir Thomas Gates 
and Sir George Somers, 72. 

Jay, John, envoy to Madrid, 171, 174; 
treats with Count de Aranda, 175; 
saves the West to his country, 182; 
treaty negotiated by, with England, 
1S4. 

Jefferson, Thomas, views of, on Vir- 
ginia land claim, -228; plan for 
territorial government, 258 ; views 
of, on town system, 290. 

Jesuit College, the, at Kaskaskia, 50. 

Johnson, Sir William, negotiations vvilli 
the Six Nations, 132. 

Johnston, Alexander, on provisions for 
new States, 217, 

Joliet, Louis, explores Lake Erie, 26; 
discovers the Mississippi River, 31. 

Kalm, Professor Peter, visits English 
colonies, 129. 

Kaskaskia, population of, 48; surren- 
ders to Clark, 154. 

Kentucky, land litigation in, 253. 

King George's War, 57. 



King William's War, 46, 56. 
Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, the, 
order of, founded by Spotswood, 17. 
Kirk, David, captures Quebec, 56. 

LaClede, founds St. Louis, 151. 

Lake Erie, how reached in 1796, 272. 

Land, Western, cessions, Madison's 
views on, 225-228; litigation, causes 
of, 252; ordinance of 1785, 247, 255; 
policy in Ohio, 291 ; system of the 
government, 292. 

Langlade, Captain de, takes part in 
Revolutionary War, 152. 

Lansdowne, Marquis of (Lord Shel- 
burne), negotiates with Americans 
at Paris, 182. 

La Salle, meets Joliet near Grand 
River, 30; schemes of, 32, 43; ex- 
pedition to the Northwest, 34 ; builds 
Fort Crevecoeur, 35 ; descends the 
Mississippi, 35; establishes Fort St. 
Louis, 43 ; death of, 43. 

Le Caron, missionary to the Hurons, 

23 

Livingstone, R. R., letter of Jefferson 
to, on importance of New Orleans, 
410. 

London Compan}', the, 72, 77. 

Long Lsland, attached to New York, 
9j 

" Losantiville," now Cincinnati, 278. 

Louisiana, the first geographical, 51 ; 
reserved by France, 67 ; invites set- 
tlers, [51; becomes a part of Indi- 
ana Territory, 304; annexed to the 
United States, 410, 411. 

Louisville founded, 171. 

Lucas, Governor of Ohio, war of, 322. 

Lucke Island, a boundary line, 80. 

Ludlow's line in Ohio, 282. 

Mc Arthur, Duncan, founds Chilli- 
cothe with Massie, 280. 

McDougal, delegate to Congress from 
New York, 215. 

McGee, refugee, 150. 

Madison, James, gives rule for terri- 
torial limits, 165 ; letter of, to Pen- 
dleton, 225 ; letters of, on land cession, 
225-228; on admission of Vermont, 



426 



INDEX. 



231 ; on acceptance of Northwestern 
cession, 232 ; on revenue plan, 232 ; 
on policy of land companies, 237. 

Maine, province of, bought by Massa- 
chusetts, 85, 93. 

Marietta founded, 267, 276. 

Marquette, Father, discoverer of the 
Mississippi with Joliet, 30, 32. 

Marshall, John, on Western land titles, 
246 ; influence of, on Western Re- 
serve, 371, 377. 

Maryland, named, 78; disputes con- 
cerning boundaries of, 100, 102, 103; 
resistance of, to Articles of Confed- 
eration, 207 : remonstrates with Vir- 
ginia, 20S ; ratifies Articles of Con- 
federation, 214. 

Mason and Dixon, survey Mason and 
Dixon's line, 103. 

Mason, Captain John,grant of, bounded, 
84. 

Mass, the first celebrated in Canada, 

23. 

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 83, 85 ; dis- 
putes with Connecticut, 89 ; disputes 
with New York, 94; surrenders 
Western jurisdictional claim to New 
York, 1 18 ; claim of, to Western land, 
193 ; cession of, 240. 

Massie, General, lays out Chillicothe 
with McArthur, 280. 

" Mer Douce," Lake Huron, discov- 
ered, 23. 

Miami purchase, 278, 279. 

Michigan, Lake, discovered,^25. 

Michigan, Territory, 304, 305; influence 
of habitants on, 318 ; State constitu- 
tion formed, 320; boundary quarrel 
with Ohio, 320; controversy over 
admission of, to Union, 325 ; upper 
peninsula of, objections to, 326; re- 
sources of, 326 ; population of, in 
1890, 385. 

Michilimacinac, mission of, founded, 38. 

Minnesota, State of, admitted to the 
Union, 333. 

Mississippi River, the,- discovered by 
De Soto, 7 ; by Joliet and Marquette, 
31 ; taken possession of, by La Salle, 
35; called St. Louis River, 51; 
natural western boundary of the 



United States after the Revolution, 

169; control of navigation of, 408; 

navigation of, fixed by treaty, 409. 
Mississippi valley, the, why abandoned 

by Spain, 8 ; French occupation of, 

planned by La Salle, 32. 
Missouri River, the, called St. Philip, 

5'- 

Mohawk valley, the, its importance in 
American history, 4, 15. 

Montcalm, Marquis de, principles rep- 
resented by, 68. 

Morgan, George, memorial of, concern- 
ing Western lands, 206; appeals to 
New Jersey, 236. 

Nantucket, included in cession to 
Duke of York, 92. 

National Capital, the, location of, 383. 

Neutral belt between Indian terri- 
tory and the United States proposed 
in 1814, 145. 

" New Albion," palatinate of, 95. 

"New Cseserea" (New Jersey) de- 
scribed, 95. 

New Connecticut, 97, 365. 

New England, 13, 16, 85. 

New Hampshire, grant, 84; annexed 
to Massachusetts, 85 ; becomes a 
royal colony, 85 ; becomes indepen- 
dent, 85 ; boundary difficulties, 86 ; 
Grants, the, 96. 

New Haven, colony of, 87, 88, no. 

New Jersey, bounded, 95 ; objections 
of, to Articles of Confederation, 201. 

New Netherlands, its limits, 90, 92. 

Newport, Captain, portable barge of, 14. 

New Scotland, lordship and barony of, 
82. 

New York, possibly a part of New 
England, 91 ; Western claims of, 
192; plan of, to promote adoption of 
Articles of Confederation, 210; ces- 
sion of, acce]5ted, 223, 231. 

Niagara, Fort, built, 47. 

Nicolet, Jean, discovers Lake Michi- 
gan, 25. 

North Bend, town of, 27S. 

Northwest, the, wrested from France, 
57 ; in revolution, 147 ; land claims 
in, iSS ; lands the means of defraying 



INDEX. 



427 



war expenses, 244 ; the Territory, 
first Legislature of, 295 ; boundary 
of Ohio, how fixed, 314. 
Nova Scotia, colony, ceded to England, 
66; refugees from, lands reserved 
for, 251. 

Oberlin College, 381. 

Oglethorpe, James, founds Georgia, 81. 

Ohio, first maps of, 28, 281 ; company of 
1754 formed, 58; river, difficulty of 
fortifying, 60 ; company of 1786, 259; 
purchase, 266; university, endow- 
ment of, 267, 282 ; valley, how re- 
lated to country east and south, 273 ; 
Indians in, 2S6; admission as State, 
259, 296,308,312, 314; first consti- 
tutional convention of, 315; Anti- 
slavery discussion in, 345 ; popula- 
tion of, in 1S90, 3S5; river, trade on, 
390 ; first constitution of, 399, 400. 

Old national pike, the, a Mason and 
Dixon's line, 404. 

Ontario, Lake, discovered, 24. 

Ordinance, Jefferson's, governing 
Western Territory, terms of, 261 ; of 

1787, 305. 354- 

Oswald, British commissioner at Paris, 
169, 179. 

Ottawa River, the, route to the North- 
west, 27. 

Ottawas, the, cede lands, 248. 

Ouabache River, the, 52. 

Panhandle, the, origin of, 109. 

" I'ani," slaves, 338. 

Parallel of 36° 30' north, 80. 

Parsons, General S. H., 261, 276, 277, 

359- 

Parties, political, growth of, in North- 
west, 294. 

Peniaquid, settlement at, 93. 

Penn, William, charter of, 98; buys 
Delaware, 99 ; quarrel of his family 
with Connecticut, no. 

" Pennamite and Yankee Wars," the, 
112-116. 

Pennsylvania, disputes concerning 
boundaries of, 99, loi, 102, 103, 109, 

363- 
Perry's victory, 185. 



Pickawillany, center of English trade, 

59- 

Pierce, John, Plymouth patent in name 
of, 82. 

Pitt, William, American policy of, 63. 

Pittsburg, lands about, surveyed, 106. 

Plowden, Sir Edmund, 95. 

Plan of union, the, proposed at Al- 
bany, 125, 126. 

" Plow and Harrow," the. Cutler arrives 
at, 261. 

Plunket, Colonel, in Wyoming valley, 
114. 

Plymouth, colony, boundaries of, 83 ; 
company, 72, 75 ; council, 84, 85. 

Political parties in Canada, 52 ; in 
Northwest, 294, 401-405. 

Pontiac, the Ottawa chief, conspiracy 
of, 148. 

Popular sovereignty, ignored in enab- 
ling act of Ohio, 310. 

Population, the, of New France and 
British colonies in 1754, 69; of 
the United States in 1787, 272; of 
Western Territory in 1800, 287 ; 
of Western Reserve, 278 ; of States 
of the Old Northwest, 385. 

Portages, the, in rivers, 46. 

Pownall, Governor Thomas, views of, 
concerning Western Territory, 258. 

Presque Isle, French post, 47. 

Products, the, of Old Northwest, 388. 

Providence Plantations founded, 88. 

Pro-slavery arguments in Illinois, 348, 

351- 

Public domain, the, origin of, in West- 
ern Cessions, 247 ; not a source of 
revenue, 205, 258. 

Public land system, the, 292. 

Public school statistics, the, for Old 
Northwest, 393, 394. 

Purre, Don Eugenio, seizes St. Joseph, 

173- 
Putnam, General Rufus, leads colony 
to the Muskingum, 275. 

Quebec, city, established by Cham- 
plain, 10; Province of, 121 ; act, 141. 

Queen Anne's War, 56. 

Quincy, Josiah, on secession of Eastern 
States, 406. 



428 



INDEX. 



Radisson, visits Lake Superior coun- 
try with Grosselliers, 26. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, grant of territory 
to, 71. 

Randolph, John, on slavery in Indiana, 

342. 

Rayneval, conciliatory line proposed 
by, 176, 177. 

Religion in Northwest, 395-96- 

Report of committee on Western boun- 
daries, the, 166. 

Republican party, the, its birth, 403, 
404. 

Republicans of 1802, views of, on ad- 
mission of Ohio, 291. 

Resolutions, the, of Albany Congress, 
122, 195. 

Revenue plans, in connection with 
land claims, 232. 

Rhode Island, settlements in, 88. 

River of the Holy Spirit, the, Missis- 
sippi so called, 6. 

St. Louis, the river, Mississippi so 
called, 51. 

Robert's line in Ohio, 282. 

Robertson, James, pioneer in Tennes- 
see, 257. 

Rockford, Illinois, boundary conven- 
tion at, 329. 

Ross County, Ohio, influence of, in 
Old Northwest, 297. 

Roswell, Sir Henry, Massachusetts 
granted to, 83. 

" Roving Patent," the, granted to the 
Pilgrims, 82. 

Rutledge Committee, the, on Western 
lands, 233, 234. 

Ryswick, treaty of, 46, 156. 



Saffary and Woodward, surveyors, 
run the line between Connecticut and 
Massachusetts, 89. 

Sainte Claire, Lake, origin of name, 33. 

Saint-Esprit, mission of, 29. 

Salt Springs, given to Western States, 

367- 
Saltonstall, Governor of Connecticut, 

no. 
Sandys, Sir Edwin, administration of, 

77- 



Sargent, Winthrop, secretary of North- 
west Territory, 276. 

Saut, Sainte Marie, 26, 29, 38. 

Schools, common, provisions for in 
land, 251, 254; fund for, in Con- 
necticut, 360. 

Schuyler, General Philip, letter of, 21 r. 

Secession in the Northwest advocated, 
328 ; of the Eastern States advo- 
cated, 406. 

Seven Cities of Cibola, the, 7. 

Seven Years' War, the, 66. 

Sevier, John, pioneer in Tennessee, 257. 

Seward, W. H., on political influence 
of the Northwest, 404. 

Shaler, Professor, on disadvantages of 
French colonists, 51 ; on " Toma- 
hawk System " of land surveys, 255. 

Shelburne, William, Earl, 178, 182. 

Sioux, the, first discovered, 26. 

Six Nations, the, first discovered, 26 ; 
aid England in struggle with France, 
39; their territory claimed by Vir- 
ginia and New York, 192 ; treaty 
with, 248. 

Slavery, in Ordinance of 1787, 264; 
views concerning, at close of Revolu- 
tion, 335 ; in Old Northwest, 335- 

339. 341, 342, 345. 355- 

Soldiers, in Civil War, the, furnished by 
the Old Northwest, 406. 

Somers, Sir George, grant to, from 
James I., 72. 

Southampton, Earl of, connected with 
London Company, 77. 

Spain, in the Gulf of Mexico, 6; in 
French and Indian war, 68 ; claims 
the Mississippi River, 170; refuses 
to receive Mr. Jay, 172; seizes Ft. 
St. Joseph, 173; disputes Florida 
boundary, 407, 409 ; views on Louis- 
iana question, 408 ; enters into treaty 
of San Lorenzo, 40S ; opposes treaty 
of 1783, 411 ; withdraws from Louis- 
iana, 411, 412; excluded from Mis- 
sissippi valley by treaty of 1S19, 412. 

Spotswood, Governor of Virginia, 16, 

17- 

Starved Rock, 43. 

St. Augustine, key to Spanish posses- 
sions, 9. 



INDEX. 



429 



Saint Clair, Arthur, magistrate in 
Western Pennsylvania, 106; ap- 
pointed governor of Northwest Ter- 
ritory, 276 ; treats with the Indians 
for Ohio, 2S6 ; waning popularity of, 
295; Chillicothe indictment against, 
301 ; removed from governorship, 
302 ; last years of, 303 ; explains 
anti-slavery clause of Ordinance of 
1787,340; controversy of, with peo- 
ple of Western Reserve, 366 ; county, 
2S9. 

Saint Croix valley, the, 332. 

Steamboats on Ohio and Lakes, 190. 

Steuben, Baron, Northern mission of, 
1 84. 

Stirling, Earl of, grant of New Eng- 
land to, 82. 

St. Jerome, River, the, Wabash, so 
called, 52. 

St. Joseph, fort, 42, 173. 

St. Lawrence, the, 9, n. 

St. Louis, fort on Starved Rock, 43 ; 
city of, founded, 151. 

St. Philip, river, the, Missouri, so 
called, 51. 

Strachey, Mr., assists in negotiations at 
Paris, 178. 

Stuart, Indian commissioner, negoti- 
ates with Cherokees, 132. 

Sufferers' lands, the, fire lands, so 
called, 359. 

Suffrage, in Northwest, the, 39S, 400. 

Superior, State of, proposed, 331. 

Surveys, land, methods of, 249, 252. 

Susquehannah, River, the, supposed 
outlet of Lake Erie, 26; company, 
the. III. 

Symmes, John Cleves, 276 ; purchase 
of, 278; tract named for, 278. 

Tecumseh, effort of, to resist Western 
emigration, 1S5. 

Tilghman, Pennsylvania boundary com- 
missioner, 107. 

Titles to land, 70, 370, 372. 

Toledo, the, city, 321 ; war, 322. 

Tonty, La Salle's lieutenant in Illinois, 

35- 
Townsliiji, size of, decreed, 250. 
Territorial claims, 19, 167, 270. 



Territory, the Northwest, 270, 271. 
Transportation in Northwest, 3S9, 391. 
Treaty, of Ghent, the, 185; Greenville, 

184 ; of Paris, 182, 187 ; San Lorenzo, 

40S. 
Trent, William, memorial signed by, 

207. 
Trenton decision, the, relative to Con- 
necticut-Pennsylvania controversy, 

116. 
Tupper, Gen. Benjamin, visits the 

Northwest, 274. 
Turner, Judge George, 276. 
Trumbull county, Ohio, organized, 377. 
Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut, on 

land controversy with Pennsylvania, 

117. 

United States, the, wrests Northwest 
from England, 162 ; original boun- 
daries of, 186 ; territorial growth of, 
374 ; jurisdiction of, on Western 
rivers, 384. 

Utrecht, treaty of, 56. 

Van Buren, election of, pending in 
1836, 323. 

Vandalia, 133 ; memorial, 207 ; grant, 
223. 

Varnum, Judge, James M., 276. 

Venango, fort, 61. 

Vergennes, Count de, on Spanish de- 
mands, 126. 

Vermont, in war of Independence, 97 ; 
influence of, on land question, 229; 
admission to the Union, 229. 

Verazzano, explores eastern coast of 
United States, 9. 

Vincerines, 44, 155. 

Vincent, post (Vincennes), 44. 

Vinton, Samuel F., on Ohio and Vir- 
ginia boundaries, 1S9. 

Virginia, early map of, 13 ; treaty with 
Iroquois, 59; ceded to Raleigh, 71; 
ceded to Gates and Somers, 72 ; 
named, 72; boundaries in 1609,73; 
Governor's commission, 77 ; resists 
grant to Lord Baltimore, 79; organ- 
izes Illinois county, 158; releases 
territory to Maryland, Pennsylvania, 
and the Carolinas, no, 188; claims 



430 



INDEX. 



to Ohio, 190 ; Western counties of, 
191 ; prepares to sell Western lands, 
206; denies jurisdiction of Congress, 
209; cession not accepted, 222; 
terms of cession, 237 ; vote on Ordi- 
nance of 1787, 268 ; military dis- 
trict of, in Ohio, 280. 

Wabash company, the, claims of, dis- 
missed, 223. 

Walker, Dr. Thomas, explorations of, 
in Tennessee and Kentucky, 58. 

Walpole colony, the, 133, 134, 139. 

War, the French and Indian, 62. 

War claims, settled by lands, 250. 

Ward and Halsey titles, the, in South- 
ern New York, 118, 387. 

Warren, Ohio, first court sits at, 378. 

Washington, General, appears in West- 
ern Pennsylvania, 61 ; on Western 
settlements, 258; against the Wal- 
pole grant, 140. 

Washington county, Ohio, created, 277, 
289. 

Waterways of the Continent, the, 2, 3. 

Wayne, General Anthony, 184. 

Wayne county, the original, 289, 311. 

Webster, Daniel, on Columbia River, 

384- 

West, the, colonial boundaries in, 
124; government for, 248, 261; 
prophecies concerning, 383; ques- 
tion of, three phases, 148. 

Western Reserve, the, mistaken area 
of, 28; description of, 117, 241; 
what might have been, 186; govern- 
ment of, 258 ; how different from 



Virginia military district, 280 ; sale 
of, 361 ; need of a government, 369 ; 
land titles in, 370, 372; organized 
into Trumbull county, 377 ; -develop- 
ment of, 378 ; character of settlers in, 
388. 

Whig Party in Northwest, the, 402. 

Whitfield, Rev. George, Franklin's 
letter to, 126. 

Whittlesey, Col. Charles, on Connecti- 
cut Land Company, 365. 

Wilderness Road, the, 15. 

Williams, Roger, begins the Provi- 
dence Plantation, 88. 

Windsor, Connecticut, planted, 87. 

Wisconsin, Territory of, 305 ; contends 
for upper peninsula of Michigan, 
328 ; threatens to form an indepen- 
dent State, 32S ; boundary dispute of, 
with Illinois, 329 ; boundaries of, 
fixed by Congress, 331 ; admitted as 
a State, jj;^\ population of, in 1S40, 
333 ' population of, in 1890, 385. 

Woodward and Saffary, survey Massa- 
chusetts-Connecticut line, 89. 

Wolfe, General James, principles rep- 
resented by, 68. 

Wyandottes, the, cede lands, 248. 

Wyoming Valley Massacre, the, 112, 

Wyonoak Creek, a boundary line, So. 

Xavier, Saint Francis, mission of, 
founded, 44. 

York, Duke of, grant of New Nether- 
lands to, 82. 



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